T'is the season to be jolly, fa-la-la… Wait! Wrong national holiday, even if it is just as overly exploited. So, let us don our [black and orange] gay apparel and eat more calories and PAAAARRRTYYY! Who doesn't like a good Halloween Party? (Not like you ever hear about the War against Halloween, or?)
Betty Boop also always liked a good party, and she was known to give many. In 1933, thanks to Fleischer Studios, she also gave at least three, including this one on Halloween. (Her other parties that year that we know of: Betty's Birthday Party [here] and Betty's May Party [here].)
This seasonally appropriate short film here may not be the best of the Betty Boop shorts out there, but like all her shorts, it's got its cute appeal. And while Betty was more or less always willing to let anyone join in the fun, she was never one to sit by and let a boor be a boor or let a party-pooper poop on her party – as the obnoxious ape who crashes her party here tries to do, to no avail.
In Betty Boop's Hallowe'en Party, Bonnie Poe (15 Oct 1912 – 16 Oct 1993) provides the talking voice of Betty, while Betty's singing is sometimes co-credited to Betty's most-common voice actor, Mae Questel (13 Sept 1908 – 4 Jan 1998). The song she sings, Let's All Like the Birdies Sing, was originally composed by Robert Hargreaves, Stanley J. Damerell, Tolchard Evans and possibly Harry Tilsley in 1932. Over at Fleischer Allstars, they write: "The song was recorded [in 1932] for the first time by English band leader Henry Hall. In 1933 the song was featured in the short film Betty Boop's Halloween Party. The song is performed by Bonnie Poe as Betty Boop, and featuring background vocals by Mae Questel – one of Betty's alternate voice artists. In 1934, the song was used again by Max Fleischer as the basis and title of an animated short in the Screen Songs series [here]. In 1963 the song became part of an installment in The Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyworld, and later at Disneyland."
(Spoilers) If online
sources are correct, once upon a time this flick premiered at the 2004 Fantasy
Filmfest and even had a cinema
release in the US, where the four circulating copies earned a total of $8700.
Too much, actually, considering the film itself, which sort of floats within
the realm of the kind of movie that one should be paid to see and not have to pay
to see. This, naturally, also applies to the DVD release, which, at least in the
USA, was given a new title, namely Evil
Remains.
Trailer to
Evil Remains:
Evil might, but the
memory of what you see when watching this thing won't. Trespassing is pretty much so forgettable in every way and form, although
director and scriptwriter and (partial) music composer James Anthony Merendino
(of such noteworthy filmic artistry as Witchcraft
IV: Virgin Heart [1992 / trailer], Witchcraft V: Dance with the Nevil [1993
/ trailer], Evil Never Sleeps [1995 / film] and The Upstairs Neighbor [1994 / trailer]) should be given
some credit for once again managing to put together an interesting cast of
up-and-comers, has-beens, never-beens and regularly employed character actors
(something he has done in most of his projects). Trespassing, for example, features a short appearance of an
unrecognizable Bond Girl (Maryam d'Abo of The
Living Daylights [1987 / trailer]), the always
enjoyable Kurtwood Smith (of RoboCop
[1987 / trailer]), and a
pre-"assholism scandal" Clayne Crawford. It's a shame that no one is
really given all that much to do, and that some were so obviously misdirected
in how to do what they do.
That said, however,
those with talent or at least presence (Clayne Crawford, Kurtwood Smith and
even Estella Warren as the Final GirlKristy Goodman) manage to get through the movie without too much egg
on their face, while others (Daniel Gillies of Coming Home in the Dark [2021 / trailer]) wallow lost in an
apparent misdirected thespian inability. In the case of the last name, one
hopes nothing from this movie appears on his Film Projects Reel, because were
Razzies awarded to movies of this lowly character, his ham-fisted turn as Mark,
the dude who initiates the journey to the deserted house for master's thesis
research, truly deserved a nomination far more than Estelle Warren ever did for
her appearance in Tim Burton's first massive misfire, Planet of the Apes (2001 / trailer).
Set in Louisiana, Trespassing is a riff on the old
chestnut of a group of young adults going to a deserted house with a bad
reputation, separating, and then getting slaughtered one by one. In this case,
the instigator of the field trip is Mark (Gillies), a college student out to do
some on-site research regarding a modern myth (as opposed to urban legend)
about a local boy named Carl Bryce (Jeff Galpin) who, as we see in the
annoyingly pedestrian opening segment, killed John the Asshole Dad (Will Rokos)
and Linda the Ineffectual Mom (d'Abo), and then disappeared. It seems that the
house lies on cursed land, and the curse just went and made Carl plum loco —
nothing but a myth, right? Well, what do you think? Needless to say, Carl is
still there — or is he? The curse of the property, in any event, seems to have
the effect of turning trespassers into annoying jerks (if they weren't one
already), with the exception of the Final Girl, Kristy Goodman (Warren)....
As Mark, Daniel
Gillies begins and remains a dislikable method-actor jerk; in contrast, as his
brother Tyler, Clyane Crawford remains the most believable person on screen
primarily due to his low-key approach to his character. Sharon (Ashley Scott)
as the tag-along girlfriend of the Final Girl, is little more than fodder and
as forgettable as the movie itself, but then her whole character, despite her
distinguishing sexuality — the movie came out at a time when an oddly lez-phobic
song like Kate Perry's I Kissed a Girl (And I Liked It), which came four years after this movie, could still
be seen as a pro-lez song (Oh, wait! It's still seen as an LGBTQ anthem! Weird.) — is really just there to die. (The film is set in
Louisiana, so clearly the character-there-just-to-die couldn't be
Afro-American. Hell, he film's setting may be why there isn't even an Afro-American character of note in Trespassing [10-second appearances are not "of note"].)
The cursed-land aspect
of the narrative allows the movie to veer into the territory of the
supernatural, which is at least a bit more interesting than the typical killer
hiding under the floorboards (see: A Crack in the
Floor [2000]) or in the
woods (see: any given hillbilly slasher). The house setting itself is
reminiscent of such wonderfully run-down houses of horror as found in, say, Tobe Hooper's art-house exploitation-horror classic Chainsaw Massacre (1971 / dinner), but director
Merendino fails to fully take advantage of it. Instead, he tends towards an
overuse of close-ups and dark shadows that indicates a possible lack of
directorial vision; for swathes of the movie, he also has an incredibly hard
time visually establishing and keeping a mood of dread and fear. This handicap
is already evident in the first shots of the flick, which have little to do
with the narrative other than set location, in which he scores what looks to be
a moving Mexican Day of the Dead-inspired Mardi Gras float to an almost
hilariously generic example of a droning This-Is-A-Cheap-Horror-Movie
synthesizer dirge.
Unluckily, while much
is bad or generic in Trespassing,
little is all that scary and even less is funny, which pretty much renders the
movie non-imperative viewing.
Blonde Babe of
Yesteryear Gigi Darlene
(4 Mar 1943 – 1 Jan 2002) was one the multitude of attractive, intriguing actresses of New York's low
budget sexploitation film scene of the sixties. We would hazard to say, at the
risk of offending many, that her thespian skills were definitely less
impressive than her knockout figure and alluring presence.* That said, her vacuous sexiness is a perfect fit to the classic,
surreal roughie to which she perhaps owes her lasting appeal: Doris Wishman's Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965).
*To present an opposing view, the Rialto
Reportis of the opinion: "Occasionally an actress was noted for
her looks. Less frequently she was notable for her acting ability. Gigi Darlene
had both. She was a star. She was blonde, beautiful, and expressive. A pouting,
petulant kitten. She combined an unexpected innocence with a knowing and sultry
confidence. The monochrome screen lit up with her feline presence. Her talents
were in demand and she made regular appearances in New York sexploitation
films."
A ubiquitous presence in NYC sleaze films from
around 1962 to '67, she seemingly disappeared overnight. Something that the sexploitation
film-makers of the time noticed enough that amidst the opening credits of Michael
Findlay's 1968 roughie The Curse of
Her Flesh (trailer), which
are presented in the form of graffiti scrawled on a filthy restroom wall, and
between all the other crude comments, a simple question is scrawled: "Whatever
happened to Gigi Darlene?" It was a simple query that became a cult question,
but it also long remained a rhetorical one. The last, at least, until 11 May
2014, when the fantastic sleuths of at the Rialto
Report finally answered the question of "Whatever
Happened to Gigi Darlene?"
Music not from the
film –
John Barry's Swinging City with
images from The Curse of Her Flesh:
The bio at imdb
is based entirely on their research: "Gigi Darlene was born Heli Leonore
Weinreich on March 4, 1943 in Berlin, Germany. [...] After threatening to run
away from home at age sixteen, Gigi in 1959 was allowed by her mother to
immigrate to Flushing,
Queens, New York City, where she lived with a couple of family friends. [...]
Darlene eventually moved to Manhattan; she lived on West 43rd Street and began
posing for photo shoots for various men's magazines. Gigi branched out as an
exotic dancer making the rounds at clubs in New York, New Jersey, and Long
Island. While dancing at clubs Darlene met and befriended future soft-core
movie actress Darlene Bennett.** [...] Darlene started acting in assorted
low-budget sexploitation features that were made throughout the early to mid
1960's. [...] She often co-starred with Darlene Bennett in these films. [Heli's
acting / dancing /modeling pseudonym, Gigi Darlene, was inspired as much by the
1958 film Gigi (trailer) as by her good friend
Darlene Bennett.)
Gigi was working as a featured dancer at a club in New Jersey when she first
met her future husband Edwin Greal, who did a stage show as a hypnotist using
the pseudonym Charles
Lamont. Darlene and Greal got married on August 29, 1966. Gigi moved to Fort Lee, New
Jersey after marrying Greal and agreed to stop acting in movies. Greal and
Darlene eventually formed a stage act together and went on the road. [...] They
resided in Vegas for five years [as of 1975] and continued to do stage shows
before eventually moving to South Florida in 1980. Alas, shortly after moving
to South Florida Greal died at age 56 on December 18, 1980. [...] Gigi in 1981
went on to obtain a Real Estate license in Fort Lauderdale and sold time-share
apartments on and off for twenty years. Moreover, Darlene was a member of the
Screen Actors Guild and worked as an extra in movies*** that were shot in South
Florida. Gigi died from stomach cancer at a hospice in Fort Lauderdale, Florida
on New Year's Day in 2002. She was 58 years old. Her body was cremated and her
ashes were scattered off the pier in Deerfield Beach, Florida into the Atlantic
Ocean."
***None of which are listed on any
filmography of hers that we could find.
Claudia Wheeler –
The Price Is Right:
About the album above:
Assuming that the website 45worlds
is right, then Claudia Wheeler's novelty double-entendre LP The Price Is Right, with a demurely delectable
Gigi Darlene on the cover, was released in 1962, the same year Gigi had her
first film role in Sarno's lost Lash of
Lust (versus un-credited inserts, as in the US release of Juventud a la intemperie / The
Unsatisfied). The
songs on the LP (The Price Is Right – Take Down Your Drawers, Miss Hemingway –
If You Can't Find a Nail, I'll Give You A Screw – I Never Saw A Crack Like That
Before – Get Cha Hands Off My Bowling Ball – Don't Stick Your Finger Into My
Business – Little Boy Blue, Let Me Blow Your Horn – The Daring Young Girl On
The Swing – He's A Ball Buster – My Orange Juice Man – Suzy Que – "G"
String – The Ol' Cat House – They Call Me The "Mink" Girl) were all
written by Jack Betzner
and/or Joe Davis, the
latter of whom actually founded Beacon Records, the releasing firm. Who knows
who Claudia Wheeler is, for as professionally as she sings she seems not to
have had a well-documented career. Over at Frank's Vinyl Museum,
however, Frank supplies the detailed bio info given on the albums inner sleeve:
"Claudia Wheeler is a native of Detroit who started out as a dancer in 'the
best known clubs and theatres'."
Juventud a la intemperie (1961,
dir. Ignacio F. Iquino)
The
American trailer to this Spanish movie is the original source of our
liquor/sex/violence GIF to the left. This slab of what was originally some Spanish, Franco-era
propaganda disguised as a juvi crime film is the earliest semi film credit we could locate
for Gigi.* Titled The Unsatisfied in the US when it hit the
exploitation cinemas, despite all its original and added sleaze, the movie heavily posits the idea that the young & restless are worthless
and the old fashion way of the older generation is best for us all. (Is it odd, or to be expected, that this Fascist attitude basically describes that of today's Republican Party?)
*Timeline-wise, when it
comes to her film appearances, this movie should probably be listed later in
Gigi's career. True, it was made and released in Spain in 1961, but her scene
was added much later, for the US release in 1964. So her appearance in The Unsatisfied is not actually her
film debut, though The Unsatisfiedis, in its original cut, perhaps the oldest of the movies
she appears in...
Trailer to The
Unsatisfied:
Over at All Movie, Sandra Brennen has a
quick synopsis: "In this crime melodrama, the son (Manuel Gil of The Strange
Vice of Mrs Wardh / Blade of the Ripper [1971 / trailer] and The Profile of Satan [1969 / trailer]) of a police commissioner falls in love with a girl (Marisol Ayuso) who entices men to join rigged card games. She falls for the young man
too, and tells him the truth about her employer. As a result, she is killed.
Unfortunately, the young fellow is blamed for the crime until an investigation
is launched. He eventually clears his name and the crooks are brought to
justice."
The original star attraction of the movie is of course
the French pin-up model, singer, exotic dancer and actress Rita Cadillac (13 May
1936 – 5 April 1995), who plays the nasty gal Hilda and sings a few songs — Cha-cha-cha corazoncito and Comme il est doux! — neither of which we
could find online... so here's a later disco song of hers instead.
Rita Cadillac's Merenquendê:
The Unsatisfiedis available at Something Weird, where they say that the "slick,
well-made, nasty little movie [...] gives off a very different vibe and boasts a
very different flavor than the typical U.S. teens-in-trouble film". They also
explain how Gigi Darlene came to appear in the movie: "When Lee
Hessel's Cambist
Films released a U.S. version of it in 1964, additional shot-in-New York
skin scenes were cleverly added by insert specialist Jerald Intrator (24 Sept 1920 –
28 Oct 1988), the man who added June Roberts to The Pink Pussy [a.k.a. Harassed,
Where Sin Lives and, without June, Acosada] (1964 / trailer) and put the
extra sex into The Curious Dr. Humpp
(1969 / trailer).
Typically well integrated, the inserts include a surreal moment just five
minutes into the film in which two topless gals in a dressing room exchange
words ('I'll kill you for that, you witch!'), then suddenly fight to the death
with a pair of scissors as a third gal blandly looks on: 'C'mon, break it up,
the phone's ringing!' As quickly as the fight started, it abruptly stops, and
the third gal happily shows off the (then-new) topless bathing suit she's
wearing! Wow. Other U.S. inserts include: a high-haired honey in the back room
of a club whose drink is spiked by a creep who then carries her away.... A thug
with a knife and a topless gal pose for the cover of a detective magazine....
Two semi-naked models discuss men and — Hey, look! The model on the left is GIGI
DARLENE, looking as adorable as ever...."
As late as 1966,
as can be seen by the advertisement above (found at screen 13), The Unsatisfied was still on screen if only as second feature — in
this case, with Hire-A-Model aka Rent-A-Girl (1965, see Part II)
at the Strand Art Theatre
in Kansas City.
Director
Ignacio F. Iquino (25 Oct 1910 – 29 April 1994) had a
long and fruitful career doing low budget Spanish genre films, one of his
sleaziest and bloodiest being his only horror movie, Secta siniestra / Bloody Sect (1982 / trailer).
Poet and
propagandist Frederico De Urrutia (1907 – 1988), a good Franco fascist if there
ever was one, wrote the screenplay for
Juventud a la intemperie; a known anti-Semite and
pro-Nazi, his literary highpoints include his timeless tome La paz que quiere Hitler
["The Peace that Hitler Wants"] (1939), which excused the NS
invasion of Poland, and edited Poemas de la Alemania eterna
["Poems of Eternal Germany"] (1940), which idolized Hitler as
"the restorer of an inherited Germania of the Nibelungs and champion of
the cross in front of Jews, Freemasons, Capitalists and Communists". A
Proud Boy despite his age if there ever was one, he co-wrote the Charlton
Heston vehicle Call of the Wild
(1972), which we took a look at in our RIP
Career Review Maria Rohm.
A good title
dies hard. The poster above is notto the Lash of Lust which, probably, is Gigi Darlene's true "feature
film" debut. The poster above is to a lost California-filmed exploitation
movie (filmed in 1968, released in 1972) starring another beautiful (and
deceased) Babe of Yesteryear, the
West Coast's Bambi Allen (2 May 1338 – 21 Jan 1973).
We'll return to
that movie further below, but first, let's look at Joseph "Joe" W. Sarno's (15 Mar 1921 – 26 Apr 2010) Lash of Lust, for which we could not
find a poster online and, indeed, there might not even be one. The NYC-filmed Lash of Lust in discussion is director Joe Sarno's first official directorial
credit, although his uncredited work the year earlier on Nude in Charcoal a.k.a The
Secret of Venus (1961, poster[s] below and above) is generally accepted as his true
directorial debut.
Sarno's Lash of Lust is also a lost film, so
check your attic. There doesn't even appear to any publicity material for the
film out there, much less a poster, and most online sources, including the New York Times, claim that it was
never officially released. The movie not only features the credited move debut
of Gigi (as Gigi D'Arlene) playing Dornia, but also
is the credited debut of Madame Olga herself, Audrey
Campbell (5 Aug 1929 – 8 June 2006), as well as of the legendary Dyanne
"Ilsa" Thorne (14 Oct 1936 – 28 Jan 2020). Three cult babes
extraordinaire, all in first directorial credit of the legendary Joe Sarno — if
the film truly is lost, then we're talking about a major low-culture loss if
there ever was one.
Trailer to The
Sarnos: A Life in Dirty Movies (2013):
The New York Times, by the way, describes Sarno's
Lash of Lust as "an erotic
costume drama about Gaul in the time of the Romans, shot in the forests of
upstate New York."
If that was the plot, then needless to say the movie
was not inspired by Hodge
Evens' 1961 non-literary classic TheLash of Lust (cover above), nor did it inspire the 1964
non-literary classic Lash of Lust! (cover
below) by J.D. Ford (a.k.a. Jim and Darlene
Rutherford), the author(s) of L is for Lesbian and Lesbians in White, amongst other fine literature.
Seven years
after Sarno's Lash of Lust was never
released, the un-celebrated Al Adamson
(25 July 1929 – 2 Aug 1995) — see our review of Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971) or
our RIP career review of Jim
Kelly and/or Babes of Yesteryear
look at Marilyn Joi — filmed his equally lost exploitation western, Lash of Lust (1968/72), poster way above, at the infamous Spahn Ranch. Credited to a
"George Sheaffer", the flick had nothing to do with Gaul or Romans:
it was "an adults-only sex western that concerned women being kidnapped
and abused. This time he actually came into contact with the bearded,
Christ-like Manson, as Al reported in a later interview. 'We were shooting a
scene and Manson came over with three or four of his girls. I don't know if
they were the ones that did the murders or not. Manson and his followers were
ogling the naked actresses. His women were all taking their tops off and being
a bit of a nuisance. In the end we had to physically throw them off the set.
It's hard for me to understand how people can follow a guy like that... [The Dark Side]"
As the
advertisement above (found at the great blog Temple of Schlock) reveals, unlike
Sarno's movie Adamson's actually got at least a limited run and was screened,
somewhere along the way, with the apparently equally lost and equally obscure
Albert Zugsmith production, Tom Jones
Rides Again (1971), which may just be an
unknown a.k.a. title for another movie.
If one is to believe the L.A. Times, Tom Jones Rides Again is probably the last movie to feature the
forgotten comedian Thelma White (4 Dec 1910 – 4 Jan 2005), the lead bad gal of
that great slice of exploitation fun, Tell
Your Children a.k.a. Reefer Madness
(1936).
Full movie — Tell
Your Children a.k.a. Reefer Madness:
Girls on the Rocks (1962, dir. Manuel S. Conde)
A.k.a. Karzin
in Cuba — but: "There seem to be two versions of this movie. Clearly
they are the same movie, but Girls on the
Rocks and Karzin in Cuba contain
different scenes. Girlson the Rocks is the longer movie. Maybe
it's the director's cut, I don't know. [indiefilm]"
According to the
American Film Institute, Gigi
Darlene is to be found in this semi-nudie cutie that once proclaimed that it
had been smuggled out of Cuba. (The gals never get completely nude, so it
really isn't a full-fledged nudie cutie.) The general masses, however, tend to
agree with the imdb, where someone
wrote in the trivia
section, "Although the American Film Institute lists her name among
the cast, New York sexploitation actress Gigi Darlene is not in this
Cuban-produced film." Here at a wasted life, we haven't seen this
film but can well imagine that the AFI has confused this movie with 1963's 50,000
B.C. (Before Clothing),
looked at further below, which is also known as Nudes on the Rocks.
Something Weird, which would surely
mention Gigi if she were in the movie, sells the flick, which they reveal was
originally entitled Drums of Cupid.
They have the plot: "After their yacht sinks in a storm, an all-girl
orchestra is washed up on a deserted island... and immediately start singing and
playing their instruments on the shore! Within minutes they also discover a
handsome loincloth-wearing muscleman in a tree: 'Are you Tarzan of the apes?'
'Oh no. He was my papa. Me Karzin Jr. Me grow up!' The girls are impressed,
especially when he starts to flex. Which is why the girls' prissy chaperone
won't let Karzin come too near. But that changes when a bunch of cannibals
attack and destroy their hut before Karzin chases them away. With their shelter
in ruins, Karzin guides them to his elaborate estate: a beautifully-furnished
adobe mansion complete with records, paintings, and a TV set, allegedly the
remains of other shipwrecks. The kicker here is that Karzin's a fake. So are
the cannibals. And instead of being on a deserted island, the girls are
actually along the coast of Florida. Karzin is actually the foreman of the
estate who digs playing the hero to these confused girls, while the cannibals
are Cuban dancers. But — oops! — the ultra-conservative couple who really
own the estate unexpectedly return from their vacation and are shocked to find
it crawling with near-naked girls... [Francois Pinky]"
S.W. goes on to quote
Manuel's wife, Maria Conde, who
says "My husband was shooting newsreels of the political situation for a
newsreel company [Movietone] in New York. So he produced this film in Cuba, on
the outskirts of Havana and, when he came to the United States on one of his
trips, he just brought it in with the other newsreels. Actually, he got full
support and help from the revolutionaries all through the production! Since he
had a permit to go to New York to develop color film — there were no color labs
in Cuba at the time — one day he just gathered up the family and everything he
could carry and he's gone. And those two films went with him.' Or 'Smuggled Out
of Havana Right Under Castro's Nose!' as the ads so happily boasted."
(Re)search My Trash saw Karzan in Cuba and wrote: "It's
never good to base a film on just one joke, even if the film is — like this one
— only 45 minutes long, because the novelty wears off way too quickly. So on a
story level, Karzin in Cuba is a big disappointment. At the same time,
though the film was never intended to be big drama (or big comedy for that
matter) but an early nudie cutie, with girls running around in skimpy outfits,
and sometimes even topless, and as such the film is enjoyably cheap and cheesy,
and while certainly not a masterpiece of schlock cinema, it has a certain
so-bad-it's-good-quality that makes Karzin
in Cuba easy to like — provided of course you don't take the film seriously
at all and don't see it through a feminist's eyes."
Cuban-born Manuel S. Conde — not to be confused with the Filipino actor Manuel
Condo (9 Oct 1915 – 11 Aug 1995) — had a long career in American grindhouse
cinema, though there is some evidence out there that some of what is credited
to him might actually be by a son named Manuel Conde. (Anyone out there know
for sure?) One or the other was the cinematographer on one of the great sleaze disasterpieces
of horror, Walt Davis' Evil Come, Evil
Go (1972) as well as on the hilarious Tempest Storm thriller, Mundo depravados (1967 / scene / poster above).
Evil Come, Evil Go (1972):
First 37 minutes of
1000 Shapes of a Female (1963, dir. Barry Mahon)
While this Barry
Mahon (5 Feb 1921 – 4 Dec 1999) nudie-cutie is not (yet) listed in Gigi's
filmography at imdb, All Movie lists her on the cast, an
assertion supported elsewhere online.
This innocuous tale was scribed by the
forgotten Sande N. Johnsen, who followed it up in 1964 by writing and directing
The Beautiful, the Bloody, and the Bare,
a nudie horror also set amidst an art setting; Johnsen's most popular movie,
however, appears to be his 1966 J.D. movie, Teenage Gang Debs.
Trailer to Teenage
Gang Debs (1966):
"[Barry] Mahon's
films from this period generally avoid contravening the doctrine of obscenity
law, with films such as 1,000 Shapes of
Female, Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera
(1963 / full
film), and Bunny Yeager's Nude Las
Vegas (1964 / full
film) deploying the premise of sociological study of the 'artist at work.'
The film 1,000 Shapes ratifies its
content through the focus on the lives of Greenwich Village artists in New York
and is narrated by an art dealer, David Green, who is arranging a show of nude
paintings. The film operates in a mode Mahon himself called 'semidocumentary,'
as it portends to bring to light a particular bohemian and geographical milieu
of cultural production, on given legitimacy and popularized by the
commodifcation of beat culture as well as the renown of abstract expressionism
in the late 1950s and early 1960s. [Elena Gorfinkel in her book, Lewd Looks: American Sexploitation Cinema
in the 1960s]"
Something Weird, which sells the
film, breaks down the artists and supplies the confirmation of Gigi Darlene's
appearance: "Paul (Sande Johnson, who wrote the script) is new on the
scene and has an epiphany after he accidentally gets paint on model Darlene
Bennett. His brilliant idea is to apply pigment on the boobs and butts of actual
nude girls and have them press their wet bodies against a blank canvas! But
it will take some persuasion to get the models to go along with his kooky
concept. GIGI DARLENE (in a red wig)
will have none of it, but other gals willingly comply and slather themselves
for art's sake. Marty is a primitive artist in the tradition of Picasso and
Gauguin. He is also a pompous ass who tells his beautiful model, 'You're gonna
be the mother of all mothers... Eve... Everything a woman should be!' Marty
promptly encourages her to have warm nurturing thoughts while she poses like a
bump on a log. The art dealer is also eager to have Byron (Byron Mabe [10 April
1932 – 12 May 2001]) and Margie (the great Audrey Campbell, Madame Olga
herself), a married couple who are up-and-coming artists, participate in his
exhibition. Eager to please, Margie does a painting of a busty nude, all the
while talking recipes and in-laws with her. Later, Margie gets naked and plays
muse and model for her most appreciative hubby. Then there are the wackadoos
and nonconformists who find more unorthodox means of expression — to the
bewilderment of the females who pose for their bizarre whims. From throwing
darts at paint-filled water balloons (?!) to the joker who dunks his head in a
paint bucket and proceeds to use his hair to create 'art' (??!!), nut-jobs
abound. Eventually, Paul finds the right gals for his 'Three Graces' and
directs them to imprint their naughty bits on a giant canvas. Voila! — it's
a masterpiece in the making! To celebrate their success, the artists throw a
party — complete with bongo-beating and stimulating conversation. It's a
relatively well-behaved party until one slutty broad does an impromptu and
much-needed striptease.... Surprisingly entertaining with actual on-screen
dialogue, 1,000 Shapes of a Female is another skin classic from
producer-director Barry Mahon, who made an entire career out of various female
shapes. No, this ain't art, but at least it's naked! [Lisa Petrucci]"
The advert further above is for a showing at the Capri Art in Delaware; elsewhere, at a showing at the Pointer Drive-In in
North Carolina, Mahon's film was teamed with the "serious" 1962
shot-in-Japan Italian movie L'Isola
delle Pescatrici, a.k.a. Violated
Paradise, based on the
Italian writer Fosco Maraini's 1960 novel L' Isola Delle Pescatrici (The Island of the Fisherwomen).
The full movie — Violated
Paradise:
50,000
B.C. (Before Clothing) (1963, dir. William Rose)
"I want posterity to know all about my
posterior." Zelda
(Gigi Darlene, credited as Hedi Lenore)
Gigi Darlene is Zelda,
the sexy cavewoman who has a thing for decrepet old men. Oddly enough, though
"Hedi Lenore" gets star billing on some posters, like the one above, the
girl shown is not Gigi!
In his book Prehistoric Humans in Film and Television,
Michael Klossner has the plot to this nudie-cutie with "rock-bottom"
production values and "abundant nudity, all female, all breasts and butts,
with no full frontal": "Short, homely, middle-aged ex-burlesque comic
Charlie (Charlie 'King of Hokum' Robinson) flees the shrilly
complaining wife and accidentally rides in a crazy inventor's time machine
(which looks like a taxi) to the Stone Age. Here almost all the women are nude;
the men are not. The really ugly caveman king cracks burlesque jokes with
Charlie. The caveman's problem is Gorax the Giant (Eddie Carmel [16 March 1935
– 30 July 1972] of The Brain that Wouldn't Die [1959/1962]),
who kidnaps women and threatens to eat anyone who gets in his way. Diminutive
Charlie manages to kill Gorax with a trick and is awarded a nude woman as a
mate. He returns to modern times, gets another taste of his nagging wife and
decides to go back to the old days, when men had everything."
Klossner was
less than impressed by this movie in which "men don't have to get naked
and don't have to be handsome or desirable [and] any schlemiel can score",
and points out one scene he particularly disliked, "a nasty scene in which
a girl in bikini dances with a snake in front of ugly men, until the snake
strangles her; the men don't try to help her."
Tom
Weaver, in turn, writes in his book A
Sci-Fi Swarm and Horror Horde: Interviews with 62 Filmmakers: "It
occurred to me half-way through [...] that I was perhaps seeing one of the most
bizarre old movies I was ever likely to see. The scene which caused this
thought to cross my mind: A feeble-minded twentieth-century schnook (played by
a seedy-looking older actor obviously at death's door) staggers around a
prehistoric land of topless cave girls, doing burlesque comedy routines,
wearing a tuxedo and a stovepipe hat which just happens to explode any time he
whistles 'Dixie.' And this is the movie at one of its more lucid moments!"
It seems to have
taken the combined creativity of three men to come up with the tale told in
this movie: based on an idea by director William Rose and producer Herbert
Lannard, Arnold Drake (1 March 1924 – 12 March 2007) wrote the screenplay.
Drake was a comic book writer (posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Comic
Book Hall of Fame in 2008) who seriously made the world a better place by
co-creating the original Guardians of the
Galaxy with Stan Lee as well as the original Doom Patrol for DC and, our personal favorite from our youth of yesteryear,
DC's Deadman. Drake came to work on 50,000
B.C. (Before Clothing) by way of
the early grindhouse classic The Flesh Eaters (1964), which he scripted
and also produced, when that film's director, Jack Curtis (16 June 1926 – Sept
1970), introduced him to the nudie's producer, Herbert Lannard.
Trailer
to The Flesh Eaters:
By the way,
Arnold Drake followed up his script for
50,000 B.C. with the script for the cult thriller Who
Killed Teddy Bear?(1965
/ trailer), a fact we mention only as an excuse to embed a tasty photo below of Sal
Mineo (10 Jan 1939 – 12 Feb 1976), who starred in that movie. Bisexual Minio, murdered by mugger Lionel Ray Williams, was once engaged toJill Haworth; "According to Mineo biographer Michael Gregg Michaud, Haworth
cancelled the engagement after she caught Mineo engaging in sexual
relations with another man."
Of director
William Rose's "impoverished American nudie film" that has "the
flat lack of creativity associated with 60s industrial films" — Herbert
Lannard actually was an industrial film filmmaker — DVD Talk says, "The film is incredibly polite, from its
put-the-camera-anywhere direction to the demure smiles on the faces of the
girls. [...] Many of the soft-core nudie films of the day look as though the
producers made a deal with some bar owner to round up the usual babes for a
weekend shoot, and got a strange yield of willing but sometimes not-so-gorgeous
talent. [...] At least some of B.C.'s
women, you'll be happy to know, are exceptionally ... talented, real strippers
who probably found steady work in sleazy men's magazines, while dreaming of an
entree into Playboy or Hollywood.
Some are B-girls on the way down, but others might be hot numbers on the way
up, somehow sidetracked into the humbling world of triple-Z filmmaking. At any
rate, when they smile and pose, a few actually look comfortable, as if enjoying
themselves. In the depressing world of softcore adult movies, it really helps
to have talent that doesn't appear to be miserable. Too many of the women in
these things look as if they're trying to score some cash to bail their
boyfriends out of jail, or get their kids back from the foster home. There
seems to have been enough time to do some real makeup and hairdressing, which
is a big plus."
DVD Drive-In, however, like many
people, hated the film: "Comedian Charlie Robinson is incredibly
irritating and if you think the fact that Darlene and OLGA herself Audrey
Campbell are in the film would make it worth viewing, forget it. Darlene
thankfully isn't dubbed, her luscious accent left intact, but her screentime is
incredibly short. Campbell doesn't get any lines in herself. Darlene looks
great, but the film doesn't and isn't."
She Should Have Stayed in Bed (1963, dir. Barry
Mahon)
This is the
first Mahon film that his wife, Clelle Mahon (21 Nov 1925 – 29 Dec 2008),
supposedly wrote — some four years earlier, she had also acted in his first
movie, Cuban Rebel Girls a.k.a. Assault of the Cuban Rebel Girls (1959
/ full film),
written by and starring Errol Flynn (20 June 1909 – 14 Oct 1959, of Footsteps in the Dark [1941]), who
died before the movie came out. We mention this purely as an excuse to embed
the nude Errol Flynn photo below.
But, to return
to Clelle's script, as the voiceover to the movie states, "There isn't
much to the script, all this guy does is chase that girl. Back and forth, down
the halls. Anyone could shoot this stuff."
AFIhas the plot: "A photographer (Michael Lee Barron) of nudes
waits for a woman (Terry Moore, possibly Terry More) he hopes to hire for a
magazine layout. He is standing in front of a fashionable East Side apartment
building inhabited by a group of beautiful, aspiring young actresses and
models. When the woman returns and the photographer approaches her, she thinks
he is trying to molest her, and she flees into the building. The photographer
follows in pursuit. Inside the building, the tenants prepare for the day's
activities, dressing and undressing. The photographer is slowed in his pursuit
by a delivery boy carrying a wedding cake. The fleeing girl calls a policeman,
and the chase is reversed. Cornered, the photographer explains that he only
wants to make a job offer. The girl accepts and poses nude in the photographer's
studio."
They also point
out "The plot originally centered on a movie director filming in an
apartment building. He allows his camera to stray into various apartments. The
censors [the New York State Board of Regents] took exception to the peeping tom
aspect of the film, and its format was changed for release. Also known as She Didn't Stay in Bed."
Trailer (with Gigi) to
She Should Have Stayed in Bed:
Gigi Darlene has
a big part in this movie (Not!): She's the "Blonde reading novel" who
is "wasted in a brief scene with another girl trying on lingerie, with no
implication of lesbian attraction included."
Amongst the
women that bare skin is a
woman the world forgot, Alice Denham (21 Jan 1927 – 27 Jan 2016), "a
writer, film actress and Playboy
centerfold in mid-century bohemian New York." Not only was she the
centerfold of the July 1956 issue, but the magazine also published a short
story of hers in that issue, The Deal.
You should check out her dish-all memoirs, Sleeping with Bad Boys (2006).
The musical composition by Fluxus artist Al Hansen, Alice
Denham in 48 Seconds:
If we are to
believe the purported website of
former Golden Age of Hollywood actress Terry
Moore, who was even nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress for her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952 / trailer) and played the
lead female role in the first, classic version of Mighty Joe Young (1949 / trailer), and ignore the
omission in both imdb and Wikipedia, she played the part of the model pursued by the
photographer... A possibility, we would guess, seeing that by 1978 she had even
made an Al Adamson movie, the Jim
Kelly vehicle Death Dimension (trailer), and posed for Playboy in August 1984.
The Molesters (1963, dir. Franz Schnyder)
"Why, he had to be peeping through the
keyhole, of course."
This movie
exists in two basic versions: the original Swiss version, Der
Sittlichkeitsverbrecher["The
Sex Offender"], and the later version that was re-cut as an exploitation
movie and released in the US, The
Molesters. An uncredited Gigi Darlene is found in some of the insert scenes
added for the US, namely as the "Girl Being Whipped" (also on hand,
the Babe of Yesteryear Darlene
Bennett as the "Woman with Whip" — you see her in the trailer).
Trailer to The
Molesters:
Filmed in 1962,
it premiered in Zurich on 27 March 1963. When released in Germany, the movie,
which includes footage of an actual medical castration of a man, was rated as a
"Valuable" film — in other words, a movie that one should see for the
benefit of society. It was nevertheless a flop. Of the original version, Hervé
Dumont, the director of the Swiss National Film Archive (Cinémathèque Suisse),
wrote in his book Geschichte des Schweizerfilms [History of Swiss Film]: "The
one-sided typology of the criminals (homosexuals are rich and/or artistically
active) directly reflects the prejudices of the screenplay authors and their
public."
To roughly
translate what the Swiss Radio and Television (SRF) writes about the original
version at the website:
"Generations
of cinema and television viewers shudder when they remember the 'Schoggi-Igeli' [chocolate hedgehog]
with which Gert Fröbe lured blonde little girls into the forest in order to
abuse them in the 1958 classic, It
Happened in Broad Daylight (trailer). The success of
that crime film prompted the Praesens-Film company to bring the burning theme
of child abuse (between 1945 and 1962 more than 100,000 sexual offences against
children had been registered in Switzerland) to the silver screen in the form
of a feature docu-drama. The producers also wanted to build on their
earlier successes with the depiction of sensitive topics such as Frauennot - Frauenglück [Misery and Fortune of Woman] (1929) or Feind im Blut [Enemy in the
Blood] (1931).
Misery and
Fortune of Woman —
directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein (22 Jan 1898 –
11 Feb 1948)
"Based on
real cases, backed by criminal records and with special attention given to the
then-modern methods of forensic research, [Wolfgang Menge (10 April 1924 – 17
Oct 2012)*], Richard Schweizer [23 Dec 1899 – 30 March 1965] and Franz Schnyder
[5 Mar 1910 – 8 Feb 1993] wrote the script, which was inspired by an idea by
Schnyder. The film begins with the prologue: 'What you see really happened. Files,
medical histories and confessions of those affected are the basis of this
report. Only the names of people and places have been changed.' The film did
not have the success expected..."
*Co-scripter
Wolfgang Menge cowrote the great Edar Wallace krimi The Red Circle (1960) as well as The Green Archer (1961 / German trailer).
Particularly
noteworthy is the film's zither soundtrack, by the great Walter Baumgartner (19
Nov 1904 – 3 Oct 1997), a Swiss composer who worked often with two greats of
European exploitation movies, including Jess Franco and Erwin C. Dietrich. We
couldn't find it online, but below you can listen to his nicely sleazy (if
oddly familiar) theme to Franco's Blue Rita a.k.a. Das Frauenhaus.
Walter Baumgartner's theme to
Blue Rita:
Funnily enough,
whereas the original version was found socially relevant in Germany — "Prädikat: Wertvoll" — when the
American edit hit Cleveland, the Plain
Dealer, the city's largest newspaper, rejected the ads and wrote in an
editorial that "no normal person could find either entertainment or
helpful information in The Molesters".
[Source: Jeffrey Sconce's Sleaze
Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics]
In any event,
the most commonly found English-language description found online (for example,
at My Duck Is Dead) is as follows:
"In exploring sex offenses, particularly against children, this film
reveals the inner workings of the Zurich police and INTERPOL as they pursue
persons accused of voyeurism, rape, fetishism, sadism, and masochism. After the
criminals are arrested and given psychological tests, they may be sentenced to
an institution or undergo brain surgery (with their consent) in order to be
rehabilitated."
Screen 13, whence the above
advertisement comes, was moved to write: "There was a time when a lot of
sick topics were all over the Exploitation map, several of them not being the
kind you really want to see. The advertising for this film may have promised
something more on the line of Olga's
House of Shame (1964), those who seen the trailer knew that this was going
to be a different ride all together, although sadly it was not going to be a
pretty picture. Picked up by the one-film Aristocrat Films in the US, this was
a dramatic look at the procedures of INTERPOL and the capture of sex offenders...
while choosing stuff that would bring in those offenders in the theater! Yikes!
[...] Only in The 60s that a film about this sordid topic would aim for both the
arthouse and grindhouse, and in Toledo, it just went down to the grind at the Esquire, which would later
be known for its adult films after 1969 [...]. The whistle for the first 1,000
women who saw this was clearly a good idea, considering the type of people who
might want to see this film. [...] The black-and-white style was perfect for the
ugliness and occasional campy humor — check out the courtroom scene about the
'raspberry mole' being the major clue to capturing one of those ultra creeps!
Throw in possibly some influence through the classic film M (1931 / trailer),
and some attempts at courtroom drama, and there you have it."
