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The Grindhouse Era, Part 7: 1967
A couple of things happened in 1967 to change
grindhouse movies but the most obvious change was slow
in coming.
All you need to do is compare two pairs of movies.
If you look at Good Time With a Bad Girl and Hot Thrills
and Warm Chills, you will see things look very much as
they had in the two years before. The stories were
about guys and gals in grim settings, at least in moral
terms, and all the women kept their pants on unless they
were facing away from the camera.
Compare them with Oddo and Scyla and while the stories
are just as gritty they have psychedelic elements to
them and - here we get to the point - you see a great
deal of full frontal nudity, at least in Scyla.
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Good Times With a Bad Girl tells
the story of the weekend a middle-aged businessman
spends with a woman half his age. Susan
Evans, a veteran of exploitation movies, plays the
free-spirited young woman, and you see a lot of her in
three scenes.
because, hey, that happens are every party anyone went
to in the 60’s. Well, what the unknown actress does can
be called dancing only if we broaden the category to
include grand mal seizures. Mr. Businessman gets royally
pissed that a woman he met the day before and boffs
within an hour would dare to cavort with others.
For shame, young woman who agreed to spend the weekend
with me, for shame.
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Hot Thrills and Warm Chills
is about a bank heist or some such contrivance and stars
a tough-looking blonde - we all know the type - named Rita Alexander.
Don’t know anything more about her. Don’t want to
know.
And it stars a real cutie named Bubbles
Cash.
Rita and Bubbles were two of the earliest in grindhouse
history to display attributes that were not 100%
natural. Bubbles also appears in a personal
favorite bad movie called Mars Needs Women, where she
kept her clothes on even though she plays a
stripper.
A third, uncredited
woman in Hot Thrills plays the more typical sort
of stripper, in as much as she dances topless… for about
ten minutes. No kidding. I split her
performance into two clips because the second verse is
the same as the first. I figure the producer and
director knew the movie should run at least an hour but
they had only 50 minutes of material so they grabbed a
really nice looking local stripper and said, dance for
as long as your long legs will carry you. So she
did.
There are two bits of oddness with Hot Thrills that I
just have to bring up. 1) Lorna Maitland is in it
but she stays covered throughout. This is akin to
taking the Annapurna trek and photographing the dirt
path between two of the most majestic mountains on the
planet. 2) The credits include an actress named
Jean Manson and IMDb claims this is the same Jean(e)
Manson who starred in Young Nurses six years later, when
she was 23, which would have made her 17 when she
appeared in Hot Thrills. She is credited as Kitty
and that character is the woman on the left in the
screen-grab. I may be certifiably crazy but that
woman looks like no 17-year-old I have ever known and
she looks nothing like the Jean Manson who would become
a Playmate, before moving on to much bigger
things. I dissent.
Scoop's note: I agree with Brainscan. That
is not the Jeane
Manson who later became a Playmate, and
still later became a pretty huge singing star
in French.
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That brings us to Oddo and Scyla (yes, one L).
They were both made by Nick Millard, not in New York as
so many earlier grindhouse movies had been, but in San
Francisco.
Oddo is much closer
in tone to the traditional grindhouse production,
complete with a
lesbian scene between two uncredited actresses
that is deliberately tawdry.
The story starts with a Vietnam War veteran just
returned home to find his mom and some gal tripping the
lite lesbian fantastic. So he kills them.
Rest of the movie has him arranging visits with sex
workers and repeating the whole murder thing. A one-hit
wonder named Brigitta
Reim has a short scene.
And the marvelous Janice
Kelly has a long scene prior to the concluding
act.
That is just about all there is to say about Oddo - it
has one brilliant moment, when Janice Kelly is on the
screen, but before that moment and after it, the whole
thing is bland and disappointing, the Joe Flacco of
movies.
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Scyla, by contrast,
is a whole new ballgame. Millard threw in all
sorts of mystical touches as the camera follows a guy
who thinks Cathy
Adams (as Scyla) is da bomb,
even though a witch - in the literal sense - named Circe
wants to keep him as her own. I do not know the
actress who played Circe, but hot damn, she is beautiful
from head to toe. I made only one collage of her
but she is in two
clips by herself and one
with Cathy Adams and if someone, anyone can tell
me who she is, I will swear eternal allegiance to his
family.
Antoinette
Maynard, who plays one of Circe’s nymphs, gives a
ground-breaking performance.
Millard shot her entirely in the buff and he kept the
camera on her nether regions for just about the whole
movie. All three actresses have triple B
performances, but Antoinette’s is nigh on to
gynecological. BTW, Ms Maynard would graduate
shortly after this movie into hardcore work, if you are
interested in that sort of thing.
Whether as a canary in the coal mine or as an
inspiration, Scyla was the beginning of a new chapter in
grindhouse movies. There would be a few in 1968
and 1969 that would keep things tame, but producers knew
the competition was heating up in all directions; from
this year on, movies would treat audiences at grind
houses with stuff that was much more explicit than the
movies of only a couple of years earlier.
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