Blazing Stewardesses (1975) is the sequel to the exploitation hit Naughty Stewardesses, sort of. Everyone was clamoring for a sequel, but producer John R. D'Amato really didn't want to make another one. He did, however, want to make a classic western homage. The solution? Send some stewardesses to a dude ranch. He signed up cowboy legends Robert Livingston and Don 'Red' Barry, and brought in Yvonne De Carlo. He originally planned to use the three stooges, but, when that didn't work out, he hired Jimmy Ritz and Harry Ritz to provide comic relief. The last choice was a miserable flop. The film opens like the sexploitation picture I was expecting, with one of the stewardesses discovering her boyfriend doing the nasty with Carol Bilger.

That was the only nudity in the film. What sounded like a good idea while writing the film, doing it standing on their heads, didn't work out all that well in practice, and is just one of the millions of regrets D'Amato has about this film. Bilger shows breasts and buns. The rest of the film plays like a silent era western, complete with masked bad guys, and a hero on a white horse. IMDB readers say 2.5 of 10, and I agree completely. This has little sex, poor acting, a stupid story, and painfully bad attempts at humor. D-.

Head in the Clouds (2004)

Here's the review for Head in the Clouds, from a couple of days ago. It's one of those old fashioned "love story against a backdrop of global conflict" thingies, ala Dr Zhivago, The English Patient, or Cold Mountain, but not as good.

My still caps appeared with the original review. Here's a nice little widescreen film clip.

• Charlize Theron (zipped .wmv)

Raggedy Man (1981)

SPOILERS ...

Over the years Sissy Spacek has sort of been removed from the top of our awareness of great actresses. Sissy has been nominated for the Best Actress Oscar six times (winning once for Coal Miner's Daughter). Heck, she was nominated for an acting Oscar as recently as 2002, v, and works more now than ever, but you probably don't spit out her name instantly when somebody says: "name the great mature actresses." You name Streep for sure, maybe Annette Bening and Emma Thompson and Jessica Lange, but I'll bet you don't immediately say "Sissy Spacek."

I know I don't.

I should, because she's just about as good as anyone.

She is kind of the female equivalent of Jeff Bridges in that she can be as beautiful or as ugly, as strange or as normal, as dynamic or as unobtrusive as she needs to be to deliver the role properly. Although she has never really been thought of as a "sex star," she has done nudity when her roles called for it, and has looked great doing it. And what beautiful blue-green eyes she has! I'm not sure why she fell back into the deeper crevices of our brains. She was a big A-list star back in the early 80s after Carrie and Coal Miner's Daughter, but I think she lost a lot of career momentum in the late 80s and early 90s when her productivity ground to a halt. Her recent spurt of activity can be called a comeback, I suppose, because she had none of her six Oscar nominations between 1987 and 2002, and in the entire decade from 1987 to 1996, she was only in five theatrical movies, only one of them significant, and I don't even remember her in that one (JFK).

Raggedy Man presents her in her quietly determined mode as a wartime telephone operator and divorced single mother in a small Texas town. This job allows her to support her two sons in reasonable comfort, but also confines her to her home/office 24/7, ever ready to patch through calls from her switchboard. Since she is permanently chained to the phone board, her two sons are left to wander the streets of Lower Dustbag, Texas unsupervised, although that presents no special problem in a town so small that everyone knows everyone else. Hell, this town is so small that everyone IS everyone else. They have to go to Upper Dustbag to find somebody unrelated to marry.

The story centers around the phone operator's struggle to find a better life, and the dramatic conflict comes from her affair with a young sailor who passes through town on his leave, and the fact that her liaison with the swabbie generates some violent jealousy in some drunken layabouts who wish they could be in the sailor's shiny shoes, and thus in her shiny pants.

So what the hell does that have to do with a Raggedy Man? That's the right question. Rags is a mysterious homeless man with a deformed face. He hangs around Lower Dustbag, occasionally staring at Sissy's window in the dead of night, and he seems to own no other possessions beyond his lawn mower, which he uses to make enough money to feed himself.

What the hell does he have to do with the plot?

It's a surprise.

OK, it isn't really much of a surprise if you looked at the cast and expected to see a Sam Shepherd movie. Sam was pictured very briefly in the very first scene as the father of Sissy's two young boys. We know that he was a shallow romancer who betrayed his wife,  we know that he and Sissy are divorced, and we know that he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. So why was Sam listed at the top of the cast with Sissy and the actor who played her sailor boyfriend (Eric Roberts)?

I guess you can figure out that Sam the ex-husband is also ... (drumroll) ... oh, I'm not really going to tell you. Surely you already know.

Except for the Raggedy Dude plot contrivance, the film is a nice little realistic slice of wartime Americana, with plenty of period atmosphere richly and deliberately detailed. Sissy and Eric and the two boys and the evil layabouts could have worked out enough plot between them without The Ragmeister. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the evil layabouts were also unnecessary. The film could have worked out just fine with Eric and Sissy trying to figure out whether they were in love, and if so, whether they could muster a life together. That simpler version of the film would have made it a purer piece of literature, but would also have made it simply an art movie. The extra plot contrivances, namely the attempted rape by the layabouts and the courageous rescue by The Ragatollah, were the writer's attempt to make the film commercially viable by adding some typical plot elements from suspense films.

It didn't really succeed in that regard. The film did no box to speak of.

Although I would have preferred the film purer, more realistic, and more honest, I didn't really mind those tacked-on sensationalist elements. The film still works well because of its astounding ability to time-travel back to a wartime small town, and because of the realistic performances from Sissy and Eric Roberts. Yes, I said Eric Roberts, who could play subtle roles back in the days before he became the king of straight-to-vid genre flicks. There are also some marvelous  individual scenes in Raggedy Man. One that sticks in my mind is Sissy dancing with a broom and singing along with the radio (very damned well, too!), escaping to the Caribbean in her imagination while she was trapped in her little house by the demands of her beeping switchboard.

Raggedy Man is not a big popcorn movie, but it's a good "small" film which is unjustly forgotten, and it could bring you a lot of pleasure if you enjoy character-based drama and a bit of small-town nostalgia.

I believe it also contains Sissy's last nude scene.

• Sissy Spacek (1, 2, 3)

• One bonus shot of Sissy from Mr Skin's site. They did a good job at lightening up the dark scene.

Other Crap:

• Judge Strikes Down Federal Obscenity Statute: "We find that the federal obscenity statutes burden an individual's fundamental right to possess, read, observe, and think about what he chooses in the privacy of his own home by completely banning the distribution of obscene materials"
• Linguistic scholars use the internet to study natural language.  
• Woman fights for the right to par-ty (topless).
• Turning your wife or girlfriend into a White Whore Wife! (Really creepy stuff.)
• Urban Legends "Viral ad featuring the Volkswagen Polo employs suicide bomber imagery" They determined that the ad was produced by some quirky, independent people for their own amusement, at least in theory. It seems that VW had nothing to do with it, even though it is a professional-class production.
• Film Jerk's Early Report for January 23, 2005: "Detailed coverage of all films scheduled to be released in the upcoming four weeks, including screen counts, running times and ratings."
• Recreational hypnosis - turn others into your willing sex slaves. "Just sit your slaves in front of the TV and watch them transform. The more they watch, the more they are programmed to do your bidding!"
• "The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture from 12th to mid-19th centuries."
• BIN LADEN BEMOANS LACK OF MEDIA COVERAGE FOR HIS SECOND INAUGURAL. Poor Choice of Date, Madman Concedes
• Whoa, dude ... like, where do you go to find ... a year-round 24 hour non-stop tropical beach party at a South Seas resort? ... Fiji? Hawaii's Kona Coast? Tahiti? Bali? Nah!!! Try Germany, mein dude.
• Weekly World News says that scientists can now create diamonds from dog poop. Didn't those same scientists have a hand in the script for American Wedding?
• Are We There Yet? easily tops the weekend box office. Assault on Precinct 13, despite solid reviews, took in a disappointing seven million and finished in the #6 spot. Million Dollar Baby ran up some great numbers per screen, but was only in 147 theaters.
• The trailer and official site for Inside Deep Throat
• The trailer for The Jacket, a thriller with Keira Knightley and Adrian Brody. The trailer got me curious.
  • A military veteran goes on a journey into the future, where he can foresee his own death and is left with questions that could save his life and those he loves.
• The Producers Guild of America named 'The Aviator' the best film of 2004. The Guild is often an important barometer of Oscar sentiment. In 11 of the past 15 years, the members have honored films that went on to win the best picture Oscar.
• Jesusland has reaised the Blasphemy Alert to "Severe"
• Trump ...blah, blah, blah. If you look at the picture, you'll see that somebody in the car with Mrs Trump is wearing surgical gloves. Somebody unseen. Good opening for a horror movie.
• JoBlo.com reports from Sundance, part 2.
• French actress Audrey Tautou has been chosen to play Sophie Neveu in The Da Vinci Code. (This directly contradicts an earlier report that Sophie Marceau had been chosen for the role)
• Louisiana legislators want ceiling raised on gifts to them. They feel their bribes should be at least as high as the ones to the police
• Director Robert Zemeckis (THE POLAR EXPRESS, BACK TO THE FUTURE) will helm a new remake of the epic tale of BEOWULF

Other Crap archives. May also include newer material than the links above, since it's sorta in real time.

Click here to submit a URL for Other Crap

MOVIE REVIEWS:

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Junior or Brainscan, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Words, pictures, and vids from ICMS

Although my official 6th anniversary date as a contributor on the Fun House is January 25 I thought of starting a day early and try to bring you for a week lots of hopefully interesting clips of very well known actresses.

"Nell" (1994)

Best Nude Debut, the 80's

For our next poll we're looking for the best film as well as screen nudity debut (both in the same film) by an actress between 1990-1999. The voting will begin tomorrow. Here is our current list of nominees.

This fist half features the purest of the first film and first nudity nominees...

• Emily Watson in "Breaking the Waves" (1996)
• Natasha Henstridge in "Species" (1995)
• Chloë Sevigny in "Kids" (1995)
• Catherine McCormack in "Loaded" (1994)
• Catherine Zeta-Jones in "1001 Nights" (1990)
• Portia DeRossi in "Sirens" (1994)
• Kate Fischer in "Sirens" (1994)
• Claire Forlani in "Gypsy Eyes" (1992)
• Jane March in "The Lover" (1992)

This second half features actress who may have been TV stars or had one or two small uncredited roles before their real acting debut.

• Melissa George in "Dark City" (1998)
• Elle Macpherson in "Sirens" (1994_
• Charlize Theron in "2 Days in the Valley" (1996)
• Julia Ormond in "The Baby of Mâcon" (1993)
• Angelina Jolie in "Cyborg 2" (1993)

Email Scoopy Jr. with your nominees, comments or suggestions.

Scoops,
Today we have another batch of 'caps featuring nude scenes from the late night cable series, "The Hunger".

• Ilona Elkin baring breasts, bum and bush in scenes from the episode "Anais".

• Kim Feeney, pokies, toplessness and excellent rear views from the "Fly-By-Night" episode.

• Clare Sims, toplessness while riding a dude in scenes from "The Sloan Men".

• Janine Theriault brief breast views in the episode "A Matter of Style".

"Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" (2004)
Recent stoner comedy with a farting scene that will make Mel Brookes blush.

• Paula Garcés: sexy
• Malin Akerman: topless trailer trash.
• Kate Kelton: nice cleavage farting away.
• Brooke D'Orsay: nice cleavage farting away.
• various: uncredited topless flashers.
• outtakes: what didn't make the cut.

"The Man in the Attic" (1995) (TV)
Turn-of-the-century love triangle.

• Anne Archer: partial boob.
• Shannon Collier: topless as Archer's booby double.

Correction:
In the January 16, 2005 update, Stefanie MacGillivray was misidentified as Maeve Quinlan in "Heart of America".

• Stefanie MacGillivray: heavy petting session.

"Lust for Dracula"
Anybody for a sexually explicit (lesbian) vampire movie? If so, 2004's direct-to-video Lust for Dracula should make you very happy. This is Misty Mundae the way you expect Misty Mundae, although she is not actually the star of this one. Her role is smaller, and Andrea Davis and Casey Jones had the most explicit scenes.

There is even a plot, not that it will make any coherent sense, because the movie is all over the place, basically just a bunch of sex scenes with the plot trying (and mostly failing) to glue it all together.

OK, now for the plot. Misty Mundae plays Mina, who is the lover of Julian Wells, whose character's name is Jonathan Harker. That's OK, because she has sex with Mina like she was a man, so she might as well have a man's name, and dress in male clothes. Mina wants a child but can't have one (so she reads bedtime stories and sings lullabies to a potato). Dracula (a female) comes to Mina to take her away from all this, but Mina's sister wants to off Dracula (the ole stake in the heart thing) and claim Jonathan for herself. As nutty as the first 90% of the movie is, the ending is even crazier.

Any of this make any sense to you? Well the potato/baby, possibly, but not the rest. Don't worry. There's plenty of good lesbian sex scenes to take your mind off the so-called "plot".

• Andrea Davis & Casey Jones
• Casey Jones
• Darian Caine
• Julian Wells
• Misty Mundae
• Shelly Jones

"Danny Deckchair"
Danny Deckchair is based on a true story of a man who tied weather balloons to a chair and went flying with only a 6 pack and a pellet gun (to shoot the balloons)...he lost the pellet gun. No nudity but nice caps of Justine Clarke and Miranda Otto.

• Justine Clarke
• Miranda Otto

"Fat Pizza"
Fat Pizza is a movie based on a TV comedy series. The comedy is a bit hard to describe as I don't know of any other shows quite like it. It's a bit like a slapstick sketch show but is more theme-based. Some shows are very funny but others are duds. The movie itself has nearly 200 names in the credits but some are only on screen for 10 seconds. The only topless nudity is by Rachelle Wyzenbeek but there are lots of cleavage and underwear by Shani Moffatt, June Dries, Danielle Moussa, Bindi Symons, Annalise Braakensiek, Krista Vendy, Julieanne Arbolino, Melanie Portelli, Katrina Spadone, Tuyen Le and some unknowns.

• Rachelle Wyzenbeek
• Shani Moffatt
• June Dries
• Danielle Moussa
• Bindi Symons
• Annalise Braakensiek (1, 2)
• Julieanne Arbolino
• Melanie Portelli
• Katrina Spadone
• Tuyen Le
• unknowns

"The Pact"
Topless nudity by Sigrid Thornton in The Pact, but she must be feeling her age because it is probably a body double.

• Sigrid Thornton (1, 2, 3)

"Subterano"
Subterano is a futuristic horror movie. No nudity but nice caps of Tasma Walton and Veronica Segura.

• Tasma Walton (1, 2)
• Veronica Segura

"Virtual Nightmare"
More Tasma Walton in Virtual Nightmare. She's naked but the goodies are hidden.

• Tasma Walton

"The Neighbor"
Linda Kozlowski is not an Aussie but she is married to one (Paul Hogan) and lives here a lot. No nudity, just minor pokies by her in The Neighbor.

• Linda Kozlowski

"Muriel's Wedding"
Muriel's Wedding is a humorous movie based around the maternal instincts of Muriel, played by Toni Collette. No nudity but just lots of cleavage and underwear shown by Toni, Rachel Griffiths, Pippa Grandison and Sophie Lee.

• Toni Collette (1, 2, 3)
• Rachel Griffiths (1, 2)
• Pippa Grandison (1, 2)
• Sophie Lee (1, 2)