Swedish Wildcats (1972) is now billed as a Joe Sarno film, and it is part of a major effort by the Retro arm of Seduction Cinema to bring his works to DVD. They are presenting nice packages with an interview about the film with Joe and his wife, and also a featurette produced by Seduction Cinema based on the same story. It is the tale of two sisters who work for their aunt in a high class brothel. One of the two enjoys a rich fantasy life during the day, and begins a romance with a young man who claims to be a test pilot. She tells him she is a ballerina. Meanwhile, her sister meets someone, a rich architect from a good family. Both want to escape from their aunt, played by Diana Dors.

So, this is a romance, right? Not exactly. Part of it plays like a romance, and it seems very much like Sarno's usual work. However, many of the brothel scenes involve violence and S/M, which is not like Sarno at all. The interview explained. Sarno had a concept of the girl who doesn't like her real life, and lives by day in a fantasy world that ends sort of like a Cinderella story. When he shared it with producer Vernon P. Becker, Becker wanted to make the film, but with a few minor changes to make it more commercial. It was Becker who added the violence and S/M, and the Sarnos to this day are not comfortable about that content, although Joe admitted that it probably did make it more marketable. To me, it was sort of Schizophrenic.

The firsts brothel sequence has all of the women in body paint as exotic animals resulting in some great imagery. I was only able to identify breast and buns from Cia Löwgren as the daydreaming sister, and full frontal and rear from Solveig Andersson as the other sister. There are several images of unknowns who show body parts. As I have mentioned before, Sarno wanted to make erotica for US distribution, but realized that, while he could get away with releasing it in most places in the US, he could easily be arrested while making the films, so tried Sweden, and fell in love with the Swedish casts and crews.

IMDb readers have this at 4.7 based on only 16 votes. The genre is early erotica, and Sarno was a master of it. The transfer is very nice given the age, and the English wasn't dubbed, although most of the characters had accents. This is a solid genre effort, and the animal makeup is worth the price all by itself. This is a C+. Tuna

Updates:

• There are 235 updated individual volumes in the Encyclopedia.

The Zone (1996):

The Zone is probably not a movie you want to see. Spinning it positively, it is a modest third-tier international actioner which belongs in the hyphen world (straight-to-vid, or made-for-cable). It stars Robert "Captain Cable" Davi as some kind of renegade free-lance operative who has to be coerced by an unscrupulous CIA boss into taking each new mission, presumably because of some bad will generated by previous betrayals. The end of the movie seems to indicate that this film may have been the pilot for an ongoing series of films, something like a second-rate James Bond franchise. Whatever future plans the developers once had for ace fly-boy Rowdy Welles, they never materialized. There may have been many reasons for that, as you'll see later in these comments, but the major drawback to such a series can be summed up in five words: Robert Davi as James Bond.

Rowdy Welles (Davi) has exactly the same tempestuous love-hate relationship with his CIA boss (Ben Gazzara) that McCloud had with J.D. Cannon. Gazzara knows that Davi is a reckless cowboy who disregards the rules, but he gets the job done, dammit, and he's one hell of an American. In this case, the job involves some arms dealers in the newly-emerging country of Marvesh (played by Hungary) who are planning to deliver nuclear bombs to terrorists. Despite the fact that Marvesh is so corrupt that the head arms dealer (Alexander Godunov) really runs the country, Captain Cable has to stop the plan virtually unassisted, although he is fortunate to have an ally working undercover as the arms dealer's girlfriend.

Everything progresses as predictably as you might expect, but the film is not a total washout. I can tell you some vaguely interesting things about it.

• Alexander Godunov, the loose and limber classical dancer who became a stiff actor, plays the psychotic bad guy. Because Godunov seems like kind of a shy, handsome, quiet type, and is not too cocky, the casting adds a little flavor to the film. Although he was trim and athletic and not very old (46), Godunov died mysteriously just a few weeks after this movie was lensed, presumably as a result of a lifetime of very heavy Vodka consumption. If you watch this film, you can not only see his last public appearance as an actor, but you can also see the last time he danced in public, since he cavorts around in an impressive Hungarian (er ... Marveshian) folk dance with a gypsy entertainer. I'm not sure how logical it is to portray a peasant arms dealer as the possessor of this kind of dancing talent, or how sensible it is to insert a long musical number into a violent film about terrorists, but I guess those are the sorts of things you do when you are producing low budget films, and one of your stars happens to have been one of the greatest dancers in the world. Why waste it?

• The Zone was actually filmed in Hungary, the first half mostly in Budapest, the second half on a military base somewhere out in the countryside. The interiors are actual Budapest restaurants and shopping bazaars and the early action scenes are actually filmed on boats cruising the Danube, on actual local streetcars, at the Luna Park, and across a wide swath of city streets on both sides of the river. That may be interesting to you if you enjoy the travelogue aspect of Bondian films. I once lived in Pest, and had a girlfriend who lived in Buda. I miss my time and my friends in Hungary, so a lot of the film consisted of nostalgia for me.

• There are some pretty good aviation stunts, if you like that sort of thing. The film follows the Bond formula slavishly, and that means there is a spectacular opening sequence in which Davi's character shows off some some impressive aerial artistry.

• There are plenty of other homages to Bond, including a classic scene where the bad guy has Davi cornered on a bridge, and is about to kill him, when Davi times a precipitous jump perfectly to land on a passing boat. When the villain runs to the downriver side of the bridge, Davi is holding a champagne bottle and hoisting a glass upward in the direction of Mr. Baddie. Classic Bond moment, and probably the best two minutes of the film.

So much for the interesting things. On the negative side, you already know that the plot and characterizations consist of film clichés. Those problems would not have been enough to cast this film into the utter oblivion which it has achieved. The reason why you don't see this on cable once in a while is that some of the film's dialogue, which seemed innocuous in 1996, now seems tasteless in a post 9-11 world. A very specific example is that Godunov is going to supply the terrorists with "enough explosives to destroy the World Trade Center." Oops.

If not for the unfortunate prescience of such dialogue, you might catch The Zone on cable now and again, but now? Well, that probably ain't gonna happen.

To tell you the truth, I don't know anything about the two females listed below in the nudity report. I looked up Lara Harris, and she has been in some good movies that I have seen, like The Fisher King, Demolition Man and Cameron Crowe's Singles. I don't remember her in any of those films. Of course, you'd have to have a helluva memory to recall her unforgettable performance in Demolition Man as "Taco Bell Customer", especially since that film takes place in a future time where ALL restaurants are Taco Bell.

Oh, yeah, now I remember her. She's the one who took the medium sauce and an extra napkin. Awesome!

Oh, well, good roles or not, she was at least in some good films in the early 90s, but she has done almost nothing in the past five years.

As for Patricia Rive, she was also in Demolition Man. I guess these two women work as a team! In Ms. Rive's case, however, that appearance as "police officer" was the highlight of her career, and she has not been seen on screen since her topless scene in The Zone.

As it is, you'll have a hard time finding a DVD even if you're curious about The Zone. It was never issued on Region 1 DVD. The link to the left leads to VHS info. It is long out-of-print, but you can find cheap copies from sellers on Amazon's Marketplace.

As for DVD I watched a featureless Region 4 copy from Australia, and Amazon UK indicates that they have a region-free PAL version available for six quid.

(TECHNICAL NOTE: if you live in North America, you can play a region-free PAL DVD with no problem on your computer's built-in DVD drive. You will not be able to play it on a stand-alone DVD player with a North American TV. Your DVD player will have no problem with it and will think it is doing fine, but your TV will not render a picture unless you have adapted your system for PAL/NTSC conversion.)

Based on this description, this is a C-. To be honest, this flick is not altogether awful, but it has been assembled completely by the numbers. Every moment of the film is derivative of some earlier, better film. It has the usual plot, the usual characters, the usual action scenes, and the usual dialogue, all assembled with less than the usual amount of money.

• Lara Harris (1, 2, 3, 4)
• Patricia Rive
• Bonus: Senor Skin also captured Lara in a film called Circuit Breaker, in which she does some serious werewolf fuckin'! (1, 2, 3)

Other Crap:

• Cute stuffed animals perform the final scene from Se7en
• Pope Benny Hex elected in a landslide. "possibly rallying an impressive 100 out of 115 votes, Italy's La Repubblica has reported." In the first ballot, Benny Hex got some 40 votes with the same number of ballots going to Italy's Cardinal Carlo Maria "Vodka" Martini. When the balloting went against him, Martini was shaken, but not stirred.
• Cops Nab Woman, Say Wendy's Finger a Hoax. They also arrested her on another charge unrelated to the Wendy's incident.
• King's Ransom - going for a perfect zero at RT. I don't think any film has pulled it off since Benigni's Pinocchio.
• Here is a great question for the next edition of Trivial Pursuit. Who is the best-selling comedy recording artist of all time?
• Cher is the eighth best Armenian athlete of all time.
• A serious website with a silly title: "The Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club." Sure, I admit it, I joined the Benny Hex Fan Club. It's a "hell" of a deal. The decoder ring alone was worth the price of the dues, and as a member of the Junior Pontiffs team, I will be officially infallible for 14 seconds on the 11th of September. The only thing I didn't like - I decoded my first Latin message from the Vatican TV broadcast, and the Pope said "Semper emo Ovaltinum"
• This may be fixed by the time you get there, but ... The new Pope looks familiar. Wikipedia's picture of Benny Hex is actually Emperor Palpatine!
• Scientists find an unusually complete and well-preserved skeleton of a fossil whale - in the Egyptian desert. Still no sign of a Confederate ship.
• Spring Break Fun on the Texas Gulf Coast
• A LAP-DANCING club boss today revealed he had to axe male stripper acts at his club because the women were too rowdy and 'disrespectful'.
• First look: Nic Cage in Ghost Rider. He has to ride the hell cycle mighty slow in order to keep the wig from blowing off.
• The rich are different, said F.Scott Fitzgerald. For example, this lad's high school problems are somewhat different from the ones I experienced. A 17 year-old high school student faked the theft of his BMW in order to collect insurance money to upgrade to a Bentley.
• Ladies, before you date that hunky guy you met last night, read the 10 vital signs that will reveal if he's a STUD or a DUD in bed. "The list was compiled from a dozen different American and European studies of male sexual behavior and was edited by Weekly World News' own crack medical reporting team." And I think we all know the rigorous screening required for membership in the WWN Medical Reporting Society.
• The trailer for Ma Mere
  • My kind of film - rated NC-17 for "strong and aberrant sexual content," yet also pretentious and self-consciously arty. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS! Tarkovsky meets Ron Jeremy.
  • "'Ma Mere' takes place in the Canary Islands, where the film's family shares a home. The mother (Isabelle Huppert) and her teenaged son Pierre (Louis Garrel), a pious Catholic back from boarding school, discuss his father's infidelity; the next they hear, he is dead in a car crash. Mom launches into a wild series of parties, gradually involving her son in her drugging, drinking and sex-fuelled nights out.

    When she mysteriously goes away, her son is left in the care of her mistress and an icy blonde sadist with whom he falls in love. As the film evolves, we realize that this is a period of initiation for the young man until his mother can return and fully bring him to sexual maturity and adulthood.

• The Turnpike Prank: Avoiding Tolls On The Massachusetts Turnpike
• Three supreme justices deny that the judiciary is running amok, then they hog-tied and tattooed Tim Russert and trashed the NBC studio.
• Virgin Mary on Chicago Highway: Lynne Cheney's Remarks to Christian Faithful Gathered at Roadside Shrine to Holy Likeness of a Cavernous Yawning Vagina (Even nastier than the usual article from WHITEHOUSE.ORG)
• Jon Stewart reports that one hundred eighty-five percent of Americans are overweight.
• Ocean's Twelve wins the weekly DVD "rental box office" by a landslide
  • . DVD rentals can't be predicted directly from the box office. For example, Sideways and Elektra are virtually identical performers in the rental market. They came out on DVD the same week and have produced the same results. But Sideways was an acclaimed film with a respectable $53m box office, and Elektra was a $23m flop.
  • Look down the list for some crazy surprises. Fligyht of the Phoenix has been a solid rental hit with $28m - compared to a $16m box office.
• Movies for the PSP are selling well.
• The Squooshy Pineapple is a site that re-captions news photographs. Some of them are very funny.
• For those of you with too much time on your hands - try building elaborate towers out of coins.
• Whoa! A bunch of pictures of Kelly Cuoco wearing a flimsy shirt, no bra. ("8 Simple Rules ...")
• Universal's Summer movie preview!
• Natalie Portman update ...
• Remember the woman who claimed she found a finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili? I reckon it was all bullshit. She's a professional litigant anyway, and in this case the police have hauled her away kicking and screaming. They will provide details of the investigation and arrest at a press conference Friday.
• First look: 'Superman Returns'
• The required high school reading book that's all wrong. James Agee died two years before his novel, "A Death in the Family," was published in 1957. He never lived to see the book win the Pulitzer Prize in 1958. He never even approved its final form. Now Agee scholar Michael Lofaro says that "A Death in the Family" was pulled together by a misguided editor whose final version does not match Agee's intentions.
• Brad Pitt and J-Lo top 'best butts' poll

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.

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

Here are the results of our most recent other polls...
The Top 20 Nude Scenes of 2004
The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 80s
The Best Nude Film Debuts of the 90s
Which actress has been the most convincing playing a stripper.
Who has the best bum in Hollywood?
Best All Time Television Comedy
Best Nudity in an Oscar-winning performance
The Top 20 Best Sex Scenes

Today from the Ghost...vids from 1988's "Dangerous Liaisons".

• A then 18 year old Uma Thurman looking absolutely gorgeous topless! (1, 2)

• Laura Benson, baring her bum.

• Valerie Gogan, toplessness in one more scene. The scene starts with brief views and lame lighting, but ends with very nice exposure.

"CQ2 (Seek You Too)" (2004) aka "Tout près du sol"
French-Canadian ahht-house movie written and directed by Carole Laure and starring her real-life lookalike daughter Clara Furey in her nude debut.

• Clara Furey: underwear dancing, bare assed getting gangbanged, then topless love scene.
• Danielle Hubbard: boobs and butt having sex. Check out those rockhard nibs!
• Mireille Thibault: partial boob for those who like matronly tubbies.
• lesbians: nude having sex in prison shower.

"Watermelon's Baked & Baking" (2003)
Stoner improv comedy featuring various hash brownie recipes. I first saw Watermelon in a bit part as a cashier in the Canadian indie Last Wedding. Further digging reveals that she's a Vancouver area comedian and pot activist who doesn't mind showing her cantaloupes at the local nude beach. She has an official webpage at www.melongirl.com

• Watermelon: very sexy in bustier, then topless as burlesque stripper with pasties.
• Lola Lush: topless burlesque stripper with pasties.

"Wilby Wonderful" (2004)
Comedy starring Paul Gross so you know there's going to be no female nudity. But at least he spared us by not baring his butt this time. Stars Ellen Page best known as the untouchable daughter of the trailer park supervisor in the cable series Trailer Park Boys.

• Rebecca Jenkins: in bra and panties. Very sexy for her age.
• Ellen Page: cleavage all hoed up.
• Kathryn MacLellan: cougar cleavage.
• Marcella Grimaux: tight blouse.
• Sandra Oh: slight cleavage.

"Frog-g-g!"
I loved this movie! The filmmakers of this 2004 comedy/horror flick said they tried to make a movie that would feel like a 70's drive-in movie, although set in modern times. They succeeded admirably.

Every drive-in cliché is here, and everything about the movie is well-done cheesiness. When a fish farmer's fish start mutating beyond belief (20 eyes, for example) Dr. Barbara Michaels, openly gay biologist from the EPA, comes to town to investigate possible pollution from the town's chemical plant. She doesn't mind, because her girlfriend Trixie happens to be the bartender at the local Moose lodge.

Evil plant owner Huntley Grimes has been hounded by the EPA for 30 years, so he's having chemicals dumped in a landfill near the town's water supply (and the fish farm's lake). When Barbara shows up, he convinces brother-in-law Sheriff Buford Lawson that he's being harassed, so the Sheriff sets up surveillance on Barbara.

When Barbara sends a badly mutated tadpole for analysis, it comes back with mutant genes that are similar to, but not, human. She explains that if one of these tadpoles were to grow into a frog, it would be driven to mate with its genetic match, the closest of which would be a human female. Inevitably, she's called a wacko dyke.

Suddenly a giant man-sized frog shows up and starts raping the local young women. Since poetic justice is an absolute requirement of this genre, his first victim is the plant owner's daughter.

This is just classic drive-in stuff, a ton of fun to watch, and updated with plenty of nudity, lesbianism, etc., but still just as cheesy and funny as the original. A must see!

• Kristi Russell & Ariadne Shaffer
• Eowyn Steele

Tanya Roberts
(1, 2)

PHOTOS SOON TO TALK
And Porn Will Talk Dirty! - CombiWith, a Tokyo day care company, is about to market a "talking photo." It's a picture that contains embedded messages of up to 12 minutes in the voice of the person in the photo. They're activated by running a small scanner over invisible bar codes on the photo. A spokeswoman said a typical customer might be grandparents who live far away from their grandkids and who would be delighted to hear their voices.

If you have your own site or blog, sign up today and earn some extra cash in 2005 by promoting the Fun House!