305. French Quarter

305. French Quarter (1978)
Director: Dennis Kane
Writers: Barney Cohen and Dennis Kane
From: Cult Cinema

A young woman gets drugged in the French Quarter and dreams about her past life in a brothel.

Two lines from the narrator that come early in the movie: “Anybody that wants something real bad is gonna get it real bad.” and “Mixture of half child, half girl, and all woman.” Oh, this is going to be a thing, isn’t it? It’s going to be a whole big thing.

Nope, it’s just going to be real boring the whole way through. So… better?

Christine is a young woman who decides to move to New Orleans after the death of her father. Her mother’s been dead and her father’s death leaves behind some substantial debt. She arrives in the French Quarter and starts looking for work, but no one will hire her. She finally gets a job as a topless dancer at a club. Her first night doesn’t go great, but she gets hired on (sidenote: the scene with her stripping is fantastic because it cuts to an elderly lady in the audience who is acting really impressed. Something about this delighted old woman at a titty bar filled me with joy in a way nothing else in the movie did).

Her first paycheck, though, is pretty paltry. The boss has taken out all kinds of expenses so Christine decides to quit and head home. It’s a Saturday, though, so she can’t cash the check. The bartender sends Christine to a voodoo priestess across town who will cash the check. The priestess drugs Christine and she slips into a dream where the borders of the screen are all blurry.

No, seriously, like a quarter of the frame is given over to blur for the rest of the movie. An affectation like that to indicate a dream sequence only works if you eventually leave the dream sequence. Spoiler alert: this blog gives away all the details about the movies it discusses and you should really be aware of that by now. Also, the movie doesn’t come out of this dream sequence until the very last minute.

So Christine wakes up as Trudi, a new arrival at a brothel. Since Trudi’s a virgin, she’ll be auctioned off in a few days. Meanwhile, she gets courted by a piano player who’s just arrived to start working at the brothel. They fall in love, he buys her at the auction, but that offends one of the crime syndicate operators in town. I don’t really know his role, why he’s angry at the sale, or the situation in general. All I know is he’s played by the same guy that plays the owner of the topless bar. Everyone in the dream is someone from the present. Even the other sex workers at the brothel are women Christine saw in the audience her first time dancing (which answers the question of why so many women were at this topless bar earlier).

Anyway, villain has the voodoo priestess cast a spell to kidnap Trudi. When Trudi’s about to be sacrificed, someone enters with a gun. It’s fired and we come back to the present where the police are raiding the voodoo priestess’ apartment and save Christine. Turns out she’d fallen into a sex slavery ring and was about to be sold off to someone. The cop that saves her is the piano player from the dream. They walk off together as the narrator returns, revealing himself as the cop, telling the story of how they spent the rest of their lives together. THE END

So I didn’t know what this movie was about before I watched it, as I watched, or even now that I’ve finished watching it. I guess it’s the story of rescuing Trudi from having her virginity sold (although she’s rescued by having the right person buy it so I don’t know how well that works) presented as an allegory for saving Christine from being sold into sex slavery, but there’s never any indication of that. Christine vanishes from the movie the moment her character falls asleep and, once we’re in the past, it’s really the story of this brothel, this hot-shot jazz pianist that’s moved to town, and everything else going on. Most of the time I couldn’t differentiate Trudi from the other sex workers.

The movie’s pretty boring and aimless. There are a few moments that feel like they’re supposed to be consequential, but they don’t come up again. Basically, things happen to the vaguely human-shaped things you can see through the blur for about an hour, and then it ends. The only thing that could make this a recommend is that blur, frankly. That element is pure seeing-is-believing because I’m guessing you think I’m joking or exaggerating. I’m not. The majority of the movie has the entire border of the frame blurred out. Find a clip if you can. Otherwise, skip it. It’s just puzzlingly empty and vapid.

304. Stanley

304. Stanley (1972)
Director: William Grefé
Writers: Gary Crutcher from a story by William Grefé
From: Cult Cinema

A native American Vietnam veteran in the Everglades starts taking revenge on his enemies by having his pet rattler Stanley kill them.

Tim is a Vietnam vet and a naturalist with a penchant for snakes. In fact, he likes snakes more than people. He’s happy to spend the rest of his days isolated in the swamp with his snakes in his shack, but keeps getting harried by the poachers that murdered his father. They’re hunting snakes for a local scumbag looking to make snakeskin fashion. Tim initially thwarts them, but the pair come back with a drugged-up sociopath in tow.

Tim tricks the pair into falling into quicksand and lets them die. Back at the shack, the sociopath has arrived and killed all of Tim’s snakes, including the babies of Stanley and his mate. Tim fights the man, is about to be killed by him, but Stanley springs forth and bites the sociopath over and over.

That night, Tim goes into town to a burlesque house where a friend of his does a snake act with snakes provided by Tim. Business hasn’t been great so the owner suggests a new idea: the dancer bite the head off the snake. Tim witnesses the act, comes back that night, and dumps a bag of snakes into the dancer and owner’s bed.

Finally Tim goes to the house of the man who employed the poachers and throws snakes in his pool. The guy jumps in and is swarmed. However, his daughter witnesses it and Tim kidnaps her. He takes her back to his swamp saying his Eden needs an Eve. When she tries to leave that night, Tim tries to make his snakes kill her, but they turn on him and he ends up setting the shack on fire and dying from all the snakebites. The girl escapes. THE END

I feel at once like I left a lot of detail out of that description and went on too long. The movie takes a long time to establish the characters and get to any of the killing plus there’s a tonal issue throughout. When Tim kidnaps the girl, there’s a treacly love song playing, even over the part where he tells her, “I want to rape you.”

Yeah, what?

The closing credits play over an upbeat pro-environment song, the some one that opens the movie. How it in any way relates or is appropriate is beyond me.

Beyond the tonal problem is, as I mentioned, the timing and pacing. We take forever to establish where Tim stands in relation to these other characters and why he’d have cause to want to kill them. Then we don’t get any sort of cat-and-mouse, no moments of Tim planning or trying or failing. We literally have a scene with the character introduced, a scene with them sinning against snakes, then their death which is usually done without any panache or tension. Add to that incestuous and pedophilic overtones regarding the main villain’s daughter and you have a movie that’s actively trying to make me turn it off.

This kind of flick is supposed to be either a wronged figure getting gruesome but glorious revenge upon those who sinned against him or an obsessed figure who’s taken their cause too far. Tim should either be actively hunting the people who murdered his father and are despoiling his swamp or becoming a serial killer attacking various campers for their perceived trangressions against nature (see Memorial Valley Massacre for a movie that does that thematically. And is also a lot of fun). The movie, instead, is neither, never letting us relish Tim’s revenge and never going so far as to make us see him as a threat.

Until he kidnaps and talks about raping the daughter in the last twenty minutes of the movie. Frankly, that part felt kind of tacked-on, like they realized they’d run out of content from Tim’s revenge story so brought in this additional element.

Anyway, it’s boring and unambitious before you ever get to the objectionable stuff. Skip it.

303. Wild Riders

303. Wild Riders (1971)
Director: Richard Kanter
Writers: Richard Kanter from a story by Sal Comstock
From: Cult Cinema

Two bikers, after being kicked out of their gang, kidnap and assault two women.

Opens, literally, with a sexual assault of a woman who’s left naked, bleeding, and tied to a tree. So, yeah, fuck this movie. THE END. I don’t even have a title card to show you because the woman bound to the tree is part of it.

Turns out the woman was Pete’s girlfriend who’d been caught having sex with another man—a black man—so, you can understand why he had to do what he did. However, the women in his motorcycle gang aren’t too happy about how he treated the woman and the cops are looking for the gang in response to the assault. They tell Pete and his accomplice, Stick, to disappear for a while.

And the n-word at the four minute mark. Four minutes! All of this is within the first five minutes of this movie!

So Pete and Stick are kicked out of the gang, go riding, and find a house with two women sunning themselves by a pool. They inveigle their way in. Pete hooks up with the woman of the house while Stick rapes her friend. Pete defends Stick saying he wouldn’t do something like that without a reason. The pair end up occupying the house and holding the women prisoner. Pete leaves occasionally to try to sell things from the house and Stick abuses the women in various ways.

Eventually the husband comes home. The women had just convinced Stick that Pete was going to abandon him to take the rap, but the husband’s arrival prevents them from leaving. Then Pete shows up, convinces the husband to play the cello, and we learn that the husband’s parents died in the Holocaust. Pete is so enraptured by the husband’s playing that the husband is able to put his bow through Pete’s eye. Then he beats Stick to death with the cello. The husband comes back in to find his wife distraught over Pete’s body. Close up on the husband’s face and THE END

I’m not sure where the movie is coming from. I don’t think it wants us to sympathize with Pete and Stick, but there are hints of an Of Mice and Men situation where Pete would be fine if it weren’t for Stick and his idiocy. But Pete is pretty active in supporting Stick in assaulting and killing people. I think we’re supposed to be on the women’s side, but we spend a lot of time away from them. If they’re the subjects and the sympathetic characters, the focus should be on them and their attempts to escape. Instead, we focus on Pete. Another element that complicates all this is the women are kind of put at fault. The woman of the house is cheating on her husband, does regularly, and willingly hooks up with Pete. She even chastises her friend for not being willing to hook up with Stick. Later, after a failed escape attempt, she tries to kill Pete but can’t because of her feelings for him. Then she and Pete hook up again and she seems to become his actual partner. Even the end has her sort-of mourning this guy who’d, only moments before, pledged to kill her, her husband, and her friend.

So, yeah. Fuck you movie.

302. Prime Time

302. Prime Time aka American Raspberry (1977)
Director: Bradley R. Swirnoff
Writers: John Baskin, Stephen Feinberg, Roger Shulman, and Bradley R. Swirnoff
From: Drive-In (only 1 remains!)

A mysterious force has taken over American airwaves and is broadcasting subversive material.

There’s not much plot to summarize here as the movie is, like Kentucky Fried Movie, more a collection of sketches as opposed to something with a plot. Unlike Kentucky Fried Movie, this does have a hint of a frame narrative.

Someone has taken over American television—it’s never revealed who—and is broadcasting material that’s all one or two steps away from traditional media: a hunting show where the host and celebrity guest climb the clock tower at the University of Texas and start shooting students, menacing ads from the Catholic Church saying they’re taking over the world, a Charlie’s Angels parody where everyone—literally everyone—is fat.

The President calls his war council together, but they can’t figure out a way to respond to the situation apart from turning off the TV. The Russians and Chinese deny involvement. Something needs to be done, though. People are rioting in the street. As the President sees more and more ads mocking the military and mainstream products, he snaps and pushes the button, nuking the United States. THE END.

Obviously it’s not a movie that you judge on the plot. It’s a bunch of sketches strung together with no connective tissue whatsoever. And, yes, since its from 1977 it has some of the racist, homophobic, and religiously problematic jokes you’d expect, but I’d say fewer than I thought there would be. I was rolling my eyes less than I was going, “Is that crossing a line?” in response to the problematic jokes. In other words, it wasn’t always clear if the joke was racist or making fun of racist jokes.

And I’ll admit that I laughed a lot—much more than I expected to. Considering how the movie is put together, that makes sense. There’s no build-up and payoff here, it’s just gag after gag after gag. It’s very close to being if a joke doesn’t make you laugh, just a wait a minute, they’ll have something from a completely different genre soon. My favorite line was a throwaway moment of, I think, the General of the Salvation Army walking down the street chanting, “Repent now and Christ and the Pentagon will forgive you.”

My thoughts were that this was pure Subgenius Bulldada, and I’d say that’s good. Not all the gags have aged well, especially the parodies of “Travel to [BLANK]” ads which were all kind of racist, but enough of them landed well enough that I enjoyed the movie and would even go so far as to give it a lukewarm recommendation. There’s nothing groundbreaking or brilliant about it and some bits are parodies of specific things that I didn’t have the context for, but it passed the time well enough. If you just want some mindless gags for 75 minutes, you could do a lot worse.

301. Twister's Revenge

301. Twister’s Revenge! (1988)
Director: Bill Rebane
Writers: William Arthur, Larry Dreyfus, and Bill Rebane
From: Drive-In (only 2 remain!)

A trio of idiots plot to kidnap and ransom the programmer of a monster truck with advanced computer technology, but the truck starts to outthink them.

I started tearing up with giddy joy after reading the IMDB summary of this movie: “Three bumbling criminals have been trying to get their hands on the computerized control system of Mr. Twister, a talking monster truck with a mind of its own.” Oh God, yes please. It will not live up to my anticipated joy, but I do not care. Bless you Bill Rebane for making stupid, stupid movies. Oh so stupid.

For those unfamiliar, Rebane also directed Monster A-Go-Go and The Giant Spider Invasion (featured on MST3k) as well as The Demons of Ludlow, The Cold, and The Alpha Incident featured earlier on this blog. This movie is not as good as those.

We have a trio of criminals who learn about Mr. Twister, a monster truck with approximately $200,000 worth of computer technology in it. The trio is initially planning to steal the computer equipment, but end up, somehow, deciding to kidnap the woman who designed the tech. This takes about half-an-hour, by the way.

The designer is married to Twister’s driver and, as the husband is planning on getting a shotgun and hunting the kidnappers down, Twister starts talking to him. Twister offers an alternate plan that fails. Then they team up and start hunting down the trio one-by-one. Only, when they track one of the guys down, the pair doesn’t try to kill or capture them. Instead we get monster truck antics of cars and houses being run over/through and then the kidnapper runs away. What’s the plan exactly?

This all climaxes in a fight in a junkyard. The husband manages to defeat, in some way, each of the kidnappers until one of them gets a tank and starts chasing the truck. The truck and tank get stuck in a parade (with a weird Donald Duck float in the middle) and then, inevitably, end up at the cave where the victim is tied up. The husband saves her and the couple hides behind the tires of Twister and watch the kidnappers run into the cave just before it explodes. The kidnappers turn on their leader while the couple and Twister laugh. THE END

It’s a comedy that’s not funny. The gags never land because the timing and tone is just off. The movie is a cartoon with all the explosions and people getting run over by a monster truck but no one ever getting hurt, but it never feels like a cartoon. This feels like a movie that’s supposed to be set in the real world, just populated by idiots.

The movie is at its best when it tends to drop any pretense. The producers rented a monster truck and monster truck gonna monster truck. Cars get smashed, buildings get run over, even a swimming pool gets laid flat. And then they up the ante by adding a tank in the final twenty minutes. Those moments are fun and there should have been more of that in the movie. They’re using stunt vehicles so why isn’t the movie wall-to-wall stunts?

The answer is that would have cost money and they had to make sure the truck was returned unharmed.

I don’t have any other place in the post to mention this, but there’s a scene in a bar with a man in a bat mask. Look at that picture. That’s a fully-articulated mask. The mouth even moves. I have no idea what it’s doing in this movie. It’s not referenced before, it’s never brought up again, but the camera lingers on it for a few seconds so you get a good look.

Movie. Are you trying to send us a message? Are you trapped somewhere? Should we call for help?

As I said at the top, this was never going to live up to my expectations. The movie’s dull with a sense of humor that just doesn’t work. The humor didn’t offend me or fail to age well like a lot of these movies, the jokes just never landed. I had fun watching things get run over, knocked down, and blown up and I would have appreciated more of that kind of silliness. The movie’s not a recommend, but if you can find the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode for The Giant Spider Invasion, I highly recommend that. Go Packers!

300. Vengeance of the Zombies

300. Vengeance of the Zombies aka La rebelión de las muertas (1973)
Director: León Klimovsky
Writer: Paul Naschy
From: Drive-In (only 3 remain!)

A woman comes under the spell of an Eastern mystic while voodoo-related murders occur in London.

More Paul Naschy! Always welcome.

We open with grave robbers violating the tomb of the dead daughter of a rich family. Someone locks them in and summons the corpse as a zombie that kills them both.

Cut to Paul Naschy as an Indian mystic, Krishna, leading a small religious group in London. A skeptical psychiatrist is investigating him while Elvira, cousin of the zombie from the beginning, is a believer. Zombies break into Elvira’s, killing everyone there except Elvira. She decides to flee London for a bit and stay with Krishna in the town where her cousin was murdered. He’s bought an abandoned house, known as “the Devil House” because of the supposedly Satanic rituals performed by the family that owned it before.

Meanwhile, back in London, the psychiatrist is researching voodoo while the police investigate the ever-multiplying number of mysterious deaths. At the Devil House, Elvira continues to fall under the spell of Krishna as those who try to warn her get murdered.

Turns out Krishna has a twin brother who’s been doing everything. He raped a girl, leading to her death, so several families tried to burn him to death, but didn’t know that they’d failed. He’s spent the intervening years becoming a powerful voodoo priest and has hunted the families down to turn their daughters into zombies for revenge (the titular Vengeance). The brother has power over Krishna as well and seizes control to kidnap Elvira to make her his voodoo bride. Krishna’s love for Elvira ultimately helps him refuse to kill her, but then he gets mobbed by zombies.

As the brother is about to kill Elvira, he’s stabbed in the back by, I think, the maid (?). She was making out with the psychiatrist in the scene before and was someone I, honestly, kept mistaking for Elvira. Turns out she’s the witness sent to make sure the brother doesn’t betray the voodoo cult the way he has been. He dies, then the maid prepares to kill Elvira and is shot by the cops. The psychiatrist unties Elvira and police goggle over all the corpses. Everyone drives away leaving the house abandoned once again. THE END

What I love about Paul Naschy films is they way they seem to delight in horror tropes and ghost stories. Everything is played straight, but there’s a sense of giddiness underlying it all, like Naschy’s enjoyment of these kinds of stories suffuses the production from conception to script to production. This particular one, though, doesn’t hang together as well as other Naschy films. While the drama moves to country town with Elvira, the action—including deaths and zombies—remains in London. I really wanted to be in the isolated town where Elvira’s nightmares grow more prophetic and her situation becomes eerier and eerier.

In other words, if I’m watching a ghost story, I want to be in the house with all the ghosts. Instead, the haunting is happening in London, but our focal character has gone to the country.

Plus the revelation of a secret brother being responsible for all the carnage feels like a cheap twist. True, there’s a long history in Gothic literature of the deformed relative being locked away somewhere escaping and being the source of all the evil, but it doesn’t feel like a nod to Gothic tradition here. It’s also strange to have a seeming dichotomy set up between the good mysticism of Krishna and the bad mysticism of voodoo—it’s not just that the brother’s evil, it’s voodoo itself that’s evil. The brother kills an assistant who chastises him for using the power for vengeance instead of making voodoo dominant over the world and the maid hasn’t saved Elvira, she’s also planning on sacrificing her to further the goals of the cult.

On top of that, the Devil House and some of the voodoo ritual invoke Satanism which means the movie has three different magics operating at the same time. It’s just too busy.

Also, the music is tonally wrong. This is ending on a nitpick, but whoever did the dubbing dropped in a lot of bad, upbeat 70’s music that almost never matches the tone of what’s happening on screen. The ending has super upbeat stuff while we get “scary” stings when nothing bad or suggestive is happening.

I think this may be the least of the Naschy films I’ve seen in these sets. While it has him living it up in three different roles and the standard of committing as much as possible to the sets and setting, it just never gels and gets kind of boring. If the story had stayed in one place, either London or the countryside, it would have been a lot stronger.

299. Death By Dialogue

299. Death By Dialogue (1988)
Director: Thomas Dewier
Writers: Thomas Dewier and Susan Trabue
From: Drive-In (only 4 remain!)
Watch: YouTube (via Troma)

Five friends find a haunted script that starts inflicting bizarre and inexplicable deaths.

Do you need more than that capsule review to know whether you want to watch this movie? That’s fair. Movies like this can veer from Abraxas: Guardian of the Universe gloriousness to Death Bed: The Bed That Eats levels of dull. This movie manages to do both, which, credit where due, is an achievement in itself.

This is the movie earning 2 points.

So, Death By Dialogue opens with some guy rooting around in a basement. He opens a trunk that explodes, sending him flying across the room, but apparently not injuring him at all. He steals a script from the trunk, reads it outside, and finds references to himself being “fired.” He thinks it’s a prank by his boss and, when he goes to confront her, a woman in fishnets walks out holding a flame thrower and sets him on fire. He got fired, get it?

My notes at this point read, “Man on fire before open credits. What are the odds that it never rises to that level again?” Place your bets now.

Are you ready to wonder why we're here?!

After the credits, the quintet of main characters/deadmeats show up, find the script, and start dying in ridiculous ways. One person is blown through a wall, seemingly by an orgasm. Another is murdered by a heavy metal band that appears out of nowhere performing a song in a field. I was feeling echos of Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare and Hack-O-Lantern at this point.

Then the remaining kids figure out the script is haunted, get told the backstory by an uncle who owns the ranch, and realize they’re all trapped there until the script is done with them. Settle in because we’re in the doldrums of this flick, waiting around watching people do nothing while they wait for something to happen. However, this portion of the movie does include the sequence of the characters trying to add scenes to the script to change their fate. This sequence is a riot because it’s literally the characters pitching and shooting down ideas that the movie doesn’t have the budget for.

The man, the myth, minus motorcycles.

After a lot of thumb-twiddling, the script’s evil manifests as a bald, sword-wielding, dark knight of metal who, standing before a wall of flame summons motorcycles from explosions that flank him

MOTORCYCLES JUMP OUT OF A FIERY EXPLOSION! MOVIE, I APOLOGIZE FOR DOUBTING YOUR COMMITMENT TO AWESOME!

Things move from there to an anti-climatic ending, (THE END) but I didn’t care by that point. This movie is dumb and it is awesome, particularly because it’s so dumb. There’s no sense of pacing, the acting sucks, the story underlying the threat makes no sense, but I do not care. Someone orgasms through a barn wall into oblivion! This is so stupid!

The sluggish parts of the movie are bad, and you feel them. They’re so slow that it’s hard to even riff on them and, to be honest, they run just a little too long for the ridiculous parts to compensate. While I spent the final twenty minutes of the film giddy with laughter, the middle third was achingly slow. I’d still recommend it: it’s a movie about an evil script that seems to be smart enough to use that as an excuse to make decisions that belong in a bad script. That it’s not smart enough to do anything competently really doesn’t matter.

My copy was not the Troma version, but Troma is a distributor of this film and have uploaded a copy to YouTube here. It’s worth a watch. Just start fast-forwarding when you get bored. You won’t miss any plot and you’ll be able to tell when you’re back at a point worth watching.

298. Cindy and Donna

298. Cindy and Donna (1970)
Director: Robert Anderson
Writer: Barry Clark
From: Cult Cinema

A story of a young girl’s sexual awakening.

This one’s foul, folks. CW: sexual assault, pedophilia, and incest. Do you even need a summary after that?

Cindy is a high schooler. Her sister Donna sleeps around, their mom is an alcoholic, and their dad is a philanderer. Cindy witnesses and experiences several sexual encounters, hooks up with her sister’s dealer, and that causes Donna to stumble into the street and get hit by a car. THE END.

We have upskirt shots of the two titular characters in the first 5 minutes if there’s any chance you went into this movie not knowing what it was. What precisely it is is a movie that doesn’t want you to pay attention unless there are tits on-screen. It accomplishes this by not having anything worth paying attention to where there aren’t tits on-screen. And where there are.

In general, I’d say “so what” to such a movie. It’s a not-quite softcore pic whose only purpose is gratuitous nudity. Nearly all the movies in these sets are exploitation flicks in some shape or form so it shouldn’t be surprising to stumble across something like this. What makes Cindy and Donna stand out is how it goes about executing its various sex scenes and its general skeeviness.

Dad hooks up with a topless dancer that his friends turn him on to. After sex, she reveals that she’s 17, “The same age as your daughter.” This, by the way, is after he’s already ogled Donna. Later, when the dancer won’t meet up with him, cause the pedophilia thing isn’t a problem for him or the movie, he goes into Donna’s room and molests her. Cindy watches from the doorway. The conversation the sisters have the next morning imply that it was consensual.

Leaving already? But we’re not even halfway there! Seriously. This isn’t even halfway through the movie.

Cindy keeps getting grief from her friend for still being a virgin and the two of them go to the beach to meet guys. They find two, go back to the guys’ place, and start marking out. Cindy’s friend is going pretty far, but Cindy isn’t interested in escalating. She keeps telling the guy she’s with “no.” Meanwhile, her friend has sex all the while chastising Cindy for saying “no.”

Once Cindy and her friend get home, the smoke some weed and have sex with each other. The next morning the friend continues to chastise Cindy for not having had sex with a guy since lesbian sex “is just a substitute for the real thing.”

While all this is happening, Donna is screwing her boyfriend for weed. Since she’s come up short on money, he invites her to his place to do a nude photo shoot for two of his friends who take turns having sex with her while the boyfriend watches and laughs. Later, she’s mad at him (although the sequence is played as her initiating things), and refuses to see him when he visits. Cindy says he can come visit tomorrow and that she herself will entertain him.

The next day, he comes by, hooks up with Cindy, and is caught by Donna who yells at him. He shoves Donna out of the house and she, distraught, stumbles across the front yard, into the street, and gets hit by a car. Cindy watches the whole thing from the front door and screams as her sister dies.

Then we cut to Cindy on a swing as the movie’s theme song about Cindy needing to lose her virginity and become a woman plays happily over everything.

This movie was directed by Robert Anderson who went on to direct The Young Graduates, another movie I hated. That one likewise dealt with sexual taboos, specifically pedophilia at its core and played it as something cute and trifling. This one is all over the place in terms of sex, but seems to be in favor of all of it until, literally, the final minute. Are we supposed to read Donna’s fate as being a consequence of her promiscuity? Because everything else in the movie is played up as a joke.

You could deconstruct the sexual politics of this movie for a graduate paper because it is all kinds of fucked up. On top of all that, it’s boring and joyless. This is, hands-down, the worse movie I’ve watched from the Misery Mill. Worse than Cavegirl, worse than Going Steady. This movie is genuinely and consistently horrifying. Don’t watch it.