The Naked Detective

(1996, 90 min.)

Starring Jim Gardiner, Julia Parton, Greg Tracy, Taylor St. Clair, Camille Donatacci, Ken Dashow, Carolyn Renee Smith, John Altamura.

Written by Ken Dashow.

Directed by Ernest G. Sauer.

A PI goes to a mansion, presumably located in the same vicinity of that legendary farm where they breed models for Playboy, to find out who is trying to kill a very wealthy, very old man (as played by comparatively young man Dashow, who brings some dirty enthusiasm to his role, and who also wrote the script). The suspects include his gold-digger wife (St. Clair), his nurse (Donatacci, and perverse troll that I am, I can’t help but wonder if she and hubby Kelsey Grammer sometimes get it on to the softcore work such as this that she did before they were married), his slow-witted, ant-obsessed son (Tracy), his sly vixen daughter-in-law (Parton), the hot-to-trot maid with a skirt that’s hiked up to just south of her chin (Smith), and the faux Italian chauffeur (Altamura).

The way the sex scenes affect you will depend on your temperament at the time. If you’re in the mood, you’ll find plenty here to keep you interested. If not, well, I tend to think of them along the same lines as the ingénue-juvenile songs from the Marx Brothers movies: annoying, but harmless. That may not seem like a fitting comparison seeing as how the songs in the Bros. movies interrupt the mayhem, the reason why we’re watching the film in the first place, while the sex scenes in movies like The Naked Detective are presumably their raison d’etre. Which in most cases is true, the surprising and welcome difference here being that a remarkable amount of time is spent on the mystery angle of the film. Against all expectations, and I’m guessing against the instincts of director Sauer, perpetrator of such incredible horseshit as Sylvia Kristel’s Beauty School, Dashow has managed to craft an actual whodunit. We’re not talking Conan Doyle, Christie or Chandler, but the story does manage to hold interest, so much so that there were moments when I actually – brace yourselves, kids – got slightly exasperated when one of the ladies began to shed her clothing, because it meant another bump-in-the-road sex scene. (Bear in mind that we’re speaking in strictly comparative terms. Exasperation and impossibly stacked women peeling are usually oil and water.)

Generally in these reviews I won’t comment on the acting. I don’t think it’s fair to the actresses to take them to task for any shortcomings when they’re really not being hired to do anything but coo, preen, giggle, pout, and bounce. This subsequently kind of lets the men off the hook as well, since to not do so would be to hold forth a double standard (and let’s face it, they don’t exactly get much in the way of characterization to work with either). I will however occasionally point out acting that I think deserves some praise, and in that spirit I have to say that the best performance here actually comes from a porn star. Ms. Julia “Yes, Dolly Is My Cousin” Parton displays, among more obvious things, a rather acute sense of comic timing, making her stereotype of a character fun to watch even when she’s not slithering out of her duds.

Bottom line is, there’s a bull market of nudity and sex here, and even the scenes where the characters keep their clothes on are suffused with jiggle, but those who enter expecting just that will find a nice little treat along with it: a surprisingly watchable movie.

School Spirit

(1985, 90 min.)

Starring Tom Nolan, Elizabeth Foxx, John Finnegan, Larry Linville, Danièle Arnaud, Michael Miller, Brian Mann, Leslee Bremmer, Marta Kober, David Byrd, Liz Sheridan.

Written by Geoffrey Baere.

Directed by Alan Holleb.

Okay, chew on this: an ambitious young overachiever leaves behind the girl for whom he has strong feelings in order to carry out an important task. Unfortunately tragedy strikes when his eagerness to carry out that task causes him to crash his car, an accident that proves fatal. But will otherworldly intervention give him a second chance?

Sounds like an episode of Touched by an Angel, don’t it? Guess again.

WARNING: THIS REVIEW CONTAINS CONTEMPLATION OF RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS NOT UNRELATED TO THE FILM AT HAND BUT WHICH THE FILMMAKERS THEMSELVES HAD NO INTENTION OF ADDRESSING, AND IN FACT SEEMINGLY WENT OUT OF THEIR WAY TO AVOID. (ITALICIZED OBSERVANCES BY PROFESSOR DEVOTION.)

As you can probably guess, the description above is a tad misleading. It’s all essentially accurate mind you; it’s just spun like a dead hooker on a congressman’s yacht.

Our main character, Billy Batson (Nolan), is ambitious all right, but only about getting his wick dipped, as we can see from the very first scene in which he tries to make a young woman right in the office of his college’s president. The level of humor to which the film aspires announces itself in this first scene as we discover that the name of this particular educational institution is Lavatoire College, and yet it’s worth noting that despite this early nod to toilet humor the script doesn’t much venture into that territory again. Normally I would be the first person to say that that’s a good thing, but it’s indicative of a central problem, which I’ll get back to later.

Billy is also an overachiever, but again only when it comes to humping, at least that’s what we’re led to believe when one of his friends asks him which girl he’s with at the moment and another friend asks, “Who’s left?” The girl in question, Judith Hightower (Foxx, and if you surmised from her character’s name that she’s kind of a snob, grab yourself a cracker), is the one for whom he has strong feelings, but you only get one guess as to whether those feelings originate north or south of his belt buckle. And the task he leaves her behind in the president’s office to carry out is buying a condom from a machine in the men’s room of a local bar.

During the trip back, Billy drops the condom, which he was still holding, apparently being unfamiliar with the concept of the pocket, on the floor of his car. He reaches down to get it while still driving. Bing, bang, boom, car accident. Billy wakes up in the hospital and realizes something is wrong when he finds he suddenly has the ability to both stand next to and lie on top of the operating table at the same time.

It is interesting to note that man tends to represent the soul in visual terms as an exact, if transparent, version of himself, despite the original conception of it being far more abstract, having to do with the intellectual struggle to understand the nature of the mind versus that of the body. And yet the visual cliché prevails, not unlikely as a byproduct of the human need to define things by making them as much like ourselves as possible, right down to assigning the “soul” the exact same clothes the person was wearing at the time of death. Subsequently the incorporeal Billy Batson ends up walking around in the same ass-exposing hospital gown the corporeal one was wearing when he expired on the operating table.
A brief aside: given that the soul is generally considered to be a transcendence of the physical self, the clichéd representation of it as a blurry photocopy of the body might be construed by those who truly put stock in its value as offensive. Feel free to discuss.

As Billy wonders what the hell is going on, his uncle Pinky appears next to him. His dead uncle Pinky. Pinky (Finnegan) has come to escort Billy to the afterlife, only Billy is still fixated on nailing Judith Highpants, and manages to sneak away while Pinky is leering at a passing nurse. It is, in fact, at this point that we discover an odd little fact about our deadlings. In this film they have the power to regain corporeal solidity by suspending a hand above their heads and waving it in some sort of variation on the Little Rascals Woodchuck salute. Why this is is never explained. What inspired it aside from sheer laziness is best left unexplored. It does however allow Billy to resume his quest to track Judith Highbrow down and get into her delicates. And so he runs off and does his thing existing in a state somewhere between this world and the next.

Purgatory. More a state of being than anything else, though much as we relate to the soul by assigning it physical characteristics, so is Purgatory often described as an actual physical place. Regardless, it is a kind of way station, whether figurative or literal, between life on earth and life in heaven. It is specifically for those who have been fortunate enough to be chosen to enter Heaven, but still owe a bit of ‘vig’, if you will, on their sins, allowing them to take care of their debt before high-fiving St. Peter.
What to say about purgatory? Given that it’s a doctrine of Roman Catholicism, that alone should have a lot of different people saying a lot of different things. Depending on your position and/or prejudices you might describe it as a generosity; a spiritual get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts (not completely free, of course). Or you might look at it as a dogma that declares it’s not enough to feel bad about your misdeeds while you’re alive; you need to set aside some dead time to feel guilty as well. At any rate I would guess that no theologian anywhere would be down with the idea of Purgatory as an opportunity for further ass-grabbing.

Now just because Billy got away, that doesn’t mean that he’s off the hook and so throughout all the coming merriment we get Pinky showing up now and then to tell Billy that time’s a’runnin’ out and that pretty soon they’ve got to head for the Great Beyond, as well as a couple of scenes of Pinky talking with a guy listed in the credits as The Boss (Byrd), a snooty envoy from the other side who takes little potshots at Pinky (asked why, given that he has the choice of the finest Havanas, he insists on smoking foul cheroots, Pinky replies, “I like’em,” which works just fine for me) and berates him for shirking his duties, implying that failure to deliver his nephew on time will result in a long slide down to that famous steam room purportedly located in the earth’s core.

Angels. The Heavenly Host. Gabriel. Michael. George. Metatron (yes, the one Alan Rickman played in Dogma). The Cherubim and The Seraphim. And of course the most famous angel of all – He Who Fell. Satan. The Devil. The Prince of Darkness. Lucifer Morningstar. Hmm. ‘Lucifer Morningstar.’ Now that I think of it that actually sounds kind of girly.
Now, angels are entities unto themselves, serving largely as purveyors of messages from God to man, and are not, except for certain exceptions, be-winged versions of those that have passed from this world into the next, yet owing to mythologies through the ages they have often been represented as such, particularly when it comes to that all-too-human idea of the Guardian. A guardian angel, the concept of which isn’t an article of faith anyway, is usually portrayed in the movies as the spirit of a dear departed loved one, either continuing the care they provided while alive, or, for extra added pathos, trying to make up for that which they lacked. It’s not difficult to glean why people respond to this. It’s comforting to think that those who looked over us in life would continue to do so after their deaths. Either that or most people secretly fear that God doesn’t believe in unions, benefits, overtime and such, and subsequently those on his payroll can’t possibly be trusted to do the job right, making a certain degree of nepotism necessary. After all, the afterlife is really just like one big construction site. Surely I can’t be the first person ever to say this.
(wind and tumbleweeds)
Hello? Anyone?

Since we need a villain, and this is a college flick, we get President (not Dean as it usually goes) Grimshaw (Linville, giving a far better performance than the script deserves). Predictably his under-college-age daughter Ursula (Kober) is only interested in partying and he is determined to keep her away from the campus animals. She’s especially eager to get out of the house on this particular day, because it’s Hog Day, an annual campus tradition that involves drinking, toplessness and Slip’n’Slides covered in baby oil. (And they say we Americans have no culture.) Also scheduled for that day is an event honoring a visitor, Madeleine Lavatoire, a descendant of the college’s founder who is donating a truckload of money, which El Presidente has earmarked for a new building that is somehow going to include big profits for him. (I honestly don’t remember how this is all supposed to work, but it hardly matters as it’s only here to paint him further as a villain, you know, how dare you use the money to your own ends when it could go towards improving the educational standards, as if these clowns could give a rat’s ass about their education.) Now why Grimshaw would choose to hold this event on a day when he knows that a large portion of the student body is going to be proudly wallowing in its own filth right out there in the open is a mystery. (Well, not really, but, you know.)

The benefactor is visiting from France and so Grimshaw and Judith Highsociety go to pick her up at the airport. Everyone expects her to be a geriatric about the size of an escargot, but she turns out to be a young babe (Arnaud). Upon getting back to campus Grimshaw attempts to get Madeleine through to the ceremony with minimal exposure to the debauchery, but as luck would have it, she not only meets Billy Batson, who seems to be just as dedicated to carrying out his duties as overseer of Hog Day as he is in finding a way to diddle Judith Highfalutin’, the two of them hit it off quite well, leading him to realize there may be more to life than partying and scoring on Judith Highmom. But, of course, he has a different kind of date elsewhere…

Ah, Heaven. The Eternal City. Haven of Angels. Kingdom Come. (I’ve never liked referring to it as the Pearly Gates; it sounds too much like the outside of a Country and Western singer’s mansion.) Heaven is a concept that has long been…

Nah, on second thought, to hell with it. (Pun intended.) Why bother trying to find something interesting and hopefully semi-humorous to say about Heaven when the film itself doesn’t have the stones to admit that that’s what it’s talking about? Oh, it’s hinted at, rather broadly at that (I hardly believe when Pinky tells Billy, “You made it, my boy,” that he was welcoming him to The Babysitters’ Club), but I don’t believe the actual word is used once.

The big question is exactly why Heaven is so anxious to procure Billy Batson’s soul in the first place. (Sidestepping the issue, of course, of how he qualified to begin with. That could lead us into moral debate territory and we’re already way too far out on the thin ice of Lake Ludicrous contemplating this film from a religious standpoint as it is.) We’re never told why it’s so important for Pinky to lead Billy ‘into the light’ as it were (literally now that I think of it), a question that becomes all the more moot in the end seeing as how [SPOILER SPACE IN CASE ANYONE GIVES TWO SHITS] when Billy does in fact miss the cut-off point, he’s summarily returned to his body to continue life as if nothing happened! [/SPOILER SPACE] The staggeringly blasphemous implications of this revoltin’ and ridiculous development, not to mention the possible comic ones, seem to be utterly lost on the filmmakers. But again this goes to the heart of what’s truly wrong with the film, continuing a point I made earlier.

Somewhere up above I mentioned that the move away from bathroom humor, after it’s brief flirtation with it, was, while a good thing in and of itself, symptomatic of the film’s central problem, which is that pretty much everything it does, it does half-assed. Hog Day is supposed to be the wildest day of the school year, and yet there’s very little evidence of anything particularly raucous going on. When the Deltas squared off against Dean Wormer and his goons, there was a near jihad intensity to what transpired; here the two opposing sides (Frank Burns vs. a handful of campus cretins) seem only barely aware of each other’s existence. And, yes, there is gratuitous nudity here – including two scenes involving invisibility, one predictable (Billy sneaks into the girls’ shower room), one icky (Pinky undresses a sleeping girl, all the while cooing “my dear” at her), and even an appearance by Becky “Do I Even Own A Shirt?” LeBeau as one of the Baby Oil Slip‘n’Sliders – but even that comes off as lackluster, and when a T&A comedy doesn’t even have courage of conviction when it comes to its own horniness, well, that ain’t a good sign.

St. Matthew, in Chapter 16, Verse 3, speaks of ‘Signs of the times’ and-

(SMACK!)

Shaddup! We’re done with that part.

Inevitably with bad movies I end up pondering what could have been, and had School Spirit made an attempt to be an actual religious satire, instead of skirting around the idea for the sake of some cheap, and I mean cheap, laughs, it might have had some merit. But it seems pretty certain given their reluctance to even say the word ‘heaven’ that the producers were scared of offending someone, though who they thought in its target audience was going to be offended is a mystery to me. One wishes that they had at the very least taken a page from a different gospel – that of famed crap director Jim Wynorski who once remarked that “breasts are the cheapest special effect.”

A-a-a-a-amen!

Amen indeed, Professor. Amen indeed.

The Cheerleaders

(1973, 84 min.)

Starring Stephanie Fondue, Denise Dillaway, Jovita Bush, Brandy Woods, Kim Stanton (Kimberly Hyde), Sandy Evans, Richard Meatwhistle, Jonathan Jacobs, Raoul Hoffnung, Patrick Wright.

Screenplay by Ace Baandige, Paul Glickler and Tad Richards, from a story Glickler, Richard Lerner and Richards.

Directed by Paul Glickler

Allow me to begin with an expression perhaps not coined by my generation (that characterized by the letter directly between W and Y), but certainly brought to prominence in mainstream pop culture by same: Eew.

Modern mass psychology would have you believe that every boy dreams of fucking a cheerleader, and I’m not in a position to argue otherwise. The truth of it is that none of the schools I attended even had cheerleaders and I’ve still indulged that particular fantasy, which is either proof of how ingrained the idea is or proof of how relentlessly horny I am.

Either way, even a dedicated pervert such as myself might be turned off of the whole cheerleader thing after watching the first third of this flick. Aside from the icky almost pedophilic vibe that runs through the first fifteen minutes, there’s also the charming scene set in the male locker room that seems designed to use gang rape as a way to set up a defensive tackle joke.

The “story” (nota bene: I’m already, this early in the game, reaching the point where I’m going to have to stop qualifying this crap with quotation marks and snotty little asides) concerns Jeannie, the new girl on the cheerleading squad, and her various attempts to further her womanhood, as it were. What’s more she doesn’t seem to care much whether the instrument of her deflowering belongs to her schlubbie boyfriend Norm or, well, anybody else. As oogy as this attitude may be, it seems rather appropriate for a film where the virginal character in question is played by an actress named Stephanie Fondue. How ‘70s porn queen is that? And don’t even get me started on fellow cast members Jovita Bush and Richard Meatwhistle. (Not to mention co-screenwriter Ace Baandige, although that’s just jokey, not suggestive.)

The entire thing climaxes (narf) with a whole lotta’ fuckin’, starting with a slumber party crashed by the football team in which everyone (excepting Jeannie, natch) gets it on with everyone else, resulting in the team being too pooped to play. (They also manage to work in a scene where Jeannie’s semi-voyeuristic dad gets it on, though thankfully the girl who seduces him is the comparatively mature-looking Dillaway.) The girls compensate by finding and screwing every single member of the opposing team, in a montage set to music that includes, in an odd little coincidence, a riff identical to the theme song from Quincy. Problem is they missed one guy, meaning the rival team has a tiny little advantage, and guess who gets sent in as a last minute choice to schtup him in the locker room? That’s right, Jeannie gets to be a top tier booster and puncture her hymen all in one fell swoop. So now everyone on the field is jello, no one can do squat, and Norm, dressed like a player, but actually selling hot dogs, inadvertently picks up the ball and brings it to the end zone, winning both the game and a chance to get frisky with all of the major female characters in the backseat of a car while the credits mercifully roll.

The main problem with this film – putting aside for the moment the bad writing, bad acting, bad blah blah blah – is that it achieves a level of authenticity in a place it really shouldn’t have. Costume play is just that: play. Getting turned on by the sight of a grown woman dressed in, for example, a girl scout uniform doesn’t mean that you actually want to screw a girl scout. (And if it does, seek help. Now.) The kick comes in seeing something normally associated with innocence presented in a mature and salacious manner. The libido is frequently stimulated by the corruption of purity; an uneasy fact about humanity, but a fact nonetheless. But again, the two words are ‘costume’ and ‘play.’ The wearer is a grown woman. We don’t want to see someone who actually looks age appropriate for the costume, if it is a case of a cusp-of-pubescence cheerleader, schoolgirl, etc. The girls in this film, however, come uncomfortably close to looking the part, especially Ms. Fondue. Not helping the situation is that while she’s as sexually aggressive as the rest of the girls – and we’ll just sidestep the debate as to whether high schoolers should be sexually active in the first place – she seems to want to pop her cherry just as much if not more because it’s what she thinks she’s expected to do as for any particular desire on her part. This effect is enhanced by the somewhat vacuous air Ms. Fondue brings to her role, not entirely unrealistic for a clueless teenage girl perhaps, but regardless of the reason or circumstance, the resulting reaction is, to reiterate, eew. (Her deadpan, if it can be called that, isn’t entirely a bad thing. When she dryly states that, “A carwash is not the business world, Norm,” that was about the only true laugh I got in the whole movie.)

This does have a following, which I can only assume is more the byproduct of nostalgia than anything else, a concept I can completely get behind, but seeing as how it doesn’t hold any such special place with me, I needed more, and given that the sex scenes are fairly lackluster and the movie isn’t particular funny, not even in a dumb sort of way, this just didn’t have much to offer me at all, except the eew factor.

I actually saw one of the sequels to this, Revenge of the Cheerleaders, first, but can’t remember much about it. My colleagues would probably chalk this up to a memory block owing to the film’s inclusion of a naked David Hasselhoff, but I’ll probably get around to watching it again to review for this section. With the memory of this film fresh in my brain and the notion of a nude Hoff somewhere in my future, all I can say is…pray for me.

Click here for my colleague El Santo's take on this horny silliness. (Or is that silly horniness?)

Tee-Hee, I'm Naked!
T&A Films of the '70s, '80s and Beyond!

Remember that part on the main page when I said that this site wasn’t about psychoanalyzing me? HA! SUCKERS!! But there, let us leave the art critic to strangle his wife and move on to pastures new…

In contemplating this section of ‘Plate O’ Shrimp’ a number of ‘why’ questions came up. Why dedicate a section of the site to films of such questionable artistic merit? Why put oneself through the task of attempting to review a genre of films most of which, it can reasonably be agreed, are untenably bad? The answer to these questions is not terribly complicated. For one, I thought it would be challenging. For another, I thought it could be fun. And for a third, it would lend validation to the fact that I’ve been watching and, more recently, collecting this type of film for many years now, not to mention giving me an excuse to watch and collect even more of them. Truth is there’s a part of me that likes this kind of film.

Which, of course, leads us to the definitive ‘why’ question, the actual underlying question of which is, of course, “What the hell is wrong with you?” Or if you prefer a statement to a question, we can use the one put forth by my aquatic fowl colleague Marlowe, to whit, “I’ll never understand your fondness for this sort of thing.”

Let’s examine it. I’d have to say that the primary reason pretty much boils down to one word: tits. And, no, I don’t mean breasts. The distinction may be thin, but I believe it to be relevant: one is considered suitable and clinical enough to be used in polite company, the other is generally deemed unacceptable except when relegated to strip clubs, bachelor parties and cow pastures. I am in none too small a way fixated on women’s chests. I am not typically one to classify myself, but if I must choose a preference in that unique way that people do as if they were naming their favorite cut of chicken, I’d have to say that I am a breast man, as opposed to a leg man, or a thigh man, or a wing man…wait, scratch that last one. Now if I were discussing breast-feeding vs. bottle-feeding with my friends (as we so often do) I would be talking about breasts. But when I pop my copy of The Bikini Carwash Company II into my VCR, it’s not because I want to bask in the glow of Neriah Davis’s acting abilities; plain fact is I want to see some tits. And if that sounds like the product of arrested development and a mind adrift on the sea of drool that is adolescent sexuality, that’s actually sort of the point.

See, I am one of a generation who came of age around the time that cable television was doing the same. I remember watching MTV before it had VJs. I remember when HBO would sign off each day after a set amount of broadcasting hours. And I remember, not too many years after that, when a spate of asinine comedies motivated by the success of and (in a crude way) fashioned after such films as Animal House, Caddyshack and Stripes began to pour into the multiplexes to the dismay of people of intelligence and to the delight of teenage male libidos everywhere. I was not of an MPAA-approved age at the time to witness these debauched cinematic boobfests, nor it must be confessed was I brave enough to try and bluff or sneak my way into the theaters at which they played. But it wasn’t too long after that that cable began to get bigger, with expanded programming and more channels, like the oft-mentioned Skinemax and The Movie Channel, which, family hours be damned, dared to show R-rated films at any time of the day. And while my courage may have failed me in my desire to get into theaters featuring the shots of undraped mammary glands I so desperately craved, it served me well in convincing me to seek them out on cable, in my father’s basement, remote control clutched firmly in hand, ready to switch channels in the terrifying event that my ears might catch the sound of someone opening the door at the top of the basement steps. (To this day I have anxious dreams about scenarios like this, in which the buttons on the remote are too small or for some reason my finger just can’t quite manage to depress one and the channel remains unchanged as the authority figure edges ever closer to a vantage point from which they will be able to see my sin. Just goes to show that you don’t need to be Catholic or Jewish to have a surfeit of guilt and shame.)

And to be honest – and this is where the real shame comes in – it wasn’t just the T&A, it was the context of the T&A. I confess that I also got a gratuitous and vicarious kick out of the whole peeping-tomism angle of it. The unrelenting glee with which the male characters sought glimpses of bare breasts, sometimes with more obsessive dedication than they sought actual sex, registered with me. In as much as I couldn’t fathom at the time the possibility of actually being intimate with a woman, the possibility of being granted a look at a woman’s body subsequently took the top spot on the fantasy totem pole. (Sad to say, my self confidence in the present is not too far elevated from those bygone days. Boo-fuckin’-hoo.)

Now, this next part may seem contradictory, and I know this is going to sound like a last ditch effort to keep any female readers from thinking of me as a total pig, but I also believe I gleaned my first sense of female sexual empowerment from some of these celluloid embarrassments. It’s perfectly of the mainstream now to acknowledge that women can desire sex as much as men, but it hasn’t been that long since that wasn’t standard at all. And, as stated earlier, the women in these films are often portrayed as not much more than objects to be desired. But here and there, I noticed examples in which the women were put forth quite differently. One of the most astounding examples is the much beloved (and equally reviled) H.O.T.S., a film about a renegade sorority, infamous for its strip football grand finale. A more leering film you’re unlikely to find, but look beyond the gratuitous breast shots and you’ll notice that the women are the sexual aggressors throughout. In fact, whenever a man attempts to be sexually aggressive in the film he’s generally smacked down like a rambunctious dog at the dinner table. I’m not claiming that seeing this resulted in me dedicating my life to the teachings of Betty Friedan, but I do honestly believe that it led me, through my hormonal haze, to reconsider the idea that female sexuality might actually be something that existed for the enjoyment of females. (Perhaps I should have said Camille Paglia.)

Of course, this could be taken to a ridiculous degree, positing women so in touch with their bodies and their sexuality that they like nothing better than to whip those tops right off so the goony guys can get their eyefuls. (While I continue to doubt the reality of this, the abundance of those ‘Girls Gone Wild’ videos may yet prove me wrong.) The fact that women are at times portrayed this way in these films is actually what inspired the name of this section. That and those Playmate pictorials showing women who seem just utterly delighted to have shed all that restrictive clothing. I wish I could get that excited about being naked. Hell, I wish I could get that excited about anything.

While I was half-kidding with that crack at the beginning about analyzing myself, reading over what I’ve already written makes me wonder exactly how I come off with all this confessional crap. Fact is I’ve been accused by at least one woman of having a misogynist streak in me and I’ve also been mocked for my defense of so-called “feminist” beliefs (also by a woman, no less). Does the truth, as they say, lie somewhere in between? Well, maybe in writing about these films, I’ll find out. Which is as good a reason to do so as any other.

Y’know. Plus all the bare breasts. I mean, tits. Eh, semantics. I’m not actually that picky.


Nota Bene: While most of the reviews here will likely be of the type of T&A comedies that retarded my sexuality, I’ll try, when the opportunity presents itself, to branch out a bit into, for example, T&A action (yes, Andy Sidaris will make an appearance at some point), T&A thrillers (I recently saw former erotic DTV queen Shannon Whirry in an ad for some kind of canine medication of all random things; it may be time to revisit one of the dippy mystery/suspense boobfests with which she first made her name), T&A of yore (Russ Meyer anyone?), and even T&A what-the-fuck-is-this-supposed to be (Jim Wynorski, Bare Wench Project, ‘nuff said). You can say a lot of things about me, but you can’t say I’m not dedicated to the cause.


In Which I Bear My Shame With Pride

The Cheerleaders
School Spirit
The Naked Detective
Private Resort
Play-Mate of the Apes
H.O.T.S.
Savage Beach
Screwballs
Nude on the Moon
Love Bavarian Style NEW!


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