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.
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