The Curious Dr. Humpp, originally La Venganza del sexo, is being released by Something Weird Video on DVD Tuesday. This is an Argentine production with tons of nudity and simulated sex, including lesbians, strippers, hippy orgies, and a college girl masturbating with a vibrator. Automitrons (ugly monsters with iron boots and a blinking light in their foreheads) kidnap sexually active young men and women, and take them to the lab of Dr. Humpp. The good doctor has found the secret of eternal youth. He takes the blood from his subjects just as they climax, and injects it. This has kept both him, and the brain of the man who was his mentor alive for years.

Everything falls apart when a newspaper reporter solves the crime and rescues the women. None of the actresses are matched with roles, and none of them have credits in anything other than Argentine softcore. I suspect that they have worked under different names, Perhaps one of you is an expert on mid 60's Argentine soft core, or will know them for something else. The DVD is very clear, and porn/sci fi fusion is not very common, so this is worth seeing if you like exploitation or sci fi.

I really loved it.

John Goodman plays a film creator/promoter, and he's loosely based on the legendary William Castle - the guy who placed electrical shocks in the theater seats, blew ice-cold air through the theater, and had real skeletons dragging from wires over the patrons' heads.

Of course, since the Goodman character is a composite of Castle and many other schlockmeisters, the writer took every possible promotional gimmick from an entire decade and condensed them into one incident, in which the film premieres in Key West, conveniently so close to Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

In one of my favorite scams, Goodman hires actors to walk around town, pose as "Citizens for Decency", and denounce his own picture, because parents shouldn't let their children see something so terrifying! Needless to say, this makes every kid in town want to see it.

It's really clever how he binds the movie plot and the Cuban Missile plot together. Because the movie's corny special effects (rumble-rama?) are so exaggerated, and because people are genuinely expecting the REAL world to end, the patrons in the theater can't distinguish between what's part of the movie's tricks and what might be part of a nuclear war outside.

And the coup de grace, for me at least, was the actual B&W movie being screened: "Mant" -half man, half ant, all terror. Appropriately starring Kevin McCarthy and William Schallart, this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen. I must have laughed out loud ten times during the thing. Great stuff.

Although "Matinee" is completely a comedy, it has some interestingly realistic and likeable characters, and it makes a very serious point underneath the humor. Back in the 50's, we were innocent, and even the movies were innocent. If you could take some genuinely scary or creepy horror movie like Hellraiser and showed it to those audiences, they'd be completely unprepared for it culturally. In those days, it was pretty much all in the showmanship.

The world changed first, of course, not the movies.

Into the innocence of our lives came the Cuban Missile Crisis. This film identified that turning point exactly right. JFK told a nationwide TV audience that we wouldn't back away from nuclear war if necessary, and that the missiles in Cuba could strike any city in the Southeastern U.S. You don't think that was scary? We really thought the world might end.

We didn't quite understand why, but our comic books, Mad magazines and baseball cards didn't ever seem so important again.

A short five years later, there was no more Ike-era innocence. The Kennedy and King assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the campus revolts, the sexual revolution, the drugs - all of that seemed to happen so quickly, as if a completely new culture was superimposed on the one we grew up in.

People always have to change a lot between age 13 and age 19, I suppose, but we had to undergo complete culture shock and a new world before we ever figured out the old one. It was dramatic. I mean, if you lived in 1994, and someone showed you the year 2000, you'd have no big surprises. The internet came along, but big deal. Cultural values stayed fairly consistent. On the other hand, if you lived in 1962, and somebody showed you a preview of 1968, you'd swear that much change couldn't happen in such a short time. Oddly enough, my dad went through the same sort of thing in his generation. He turned 14 in December 1935, a pretty innocent time, despite the Depression. He turned 20 two days before the bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor, in a world in which his uncles had already been crushed under Panzers.

I guess that's why some of us old geezers, whether born in 1949 like me or 1921 like my dad, always seem reverent about the innocence of our boyhoods. Because it was crushed so completely in such a short time.

And the movies? Well, by the time the early 70's came along, all those sweetly charming softcore sex movies and mutated ant movies were being replaced by real sex and violence, just like in the streets. But we old geezers - a big part of us still longed for the days when The Brain from Planet Arous was the perfect way to pass a Saturday afternoon, and we thought we could avoid the effects of the bomb by going into the hall and placing our heads between our knees.

It's probably a funny movie if you are any age, but if you are about the right age, you have to see this movie. Remember. Get a lot of laughs. And maybe a tear or two that you can't control, for a time you lost and can't ever recapture.

IMDB summary: 6.4 out of 10.

DVD info from Amazon.

This is a meandering Grade B which takes place during the Germany of the Weimar Republic.

A woman leaves Berlin because of her dangerous mobster boyfriend. She teams up with an American grifter, and when they reach Karlsbad, the two concoct a scheme to fleece a rich Texas oil millionaire (George Peppard, Hannibal from the A-Team).

The only strength of the movie is a genuine sense of visual style, and an appreciation for the styles and fashions of the 20's.

The plot is soporific. They try to build some tension by having the mobster boyfriend close in on them, and by having The Tigress occasionally rebel against her partner's plans, but ....

... and the acting is sometimes, well, shall we say "expressionistic", to be kind? The mobster boyfriend is straight out of a Jean Rollin movie. Imagine that you got a bunch of sixth graders together and told them to act like an evil mobster - well, he wouldn't be one of the most subtle in the class. He's probably be the least subtle unless he went to school with Shatner or Larry Storch

... and the ending? Well, before the ending it was a grade b, but at least it had a compass bearing on reality. But get this.

Tigress and The American have gone their separate ways. The American flees from the mobster and the police (because he skipped out on the hotel bill) on foot, and finally escapes by grabbing a freight train in the train yard. Well, he gets into a little scuffle on the train with some hobos who want to steal his clothing, so they fight, and he has to jump from the speeding train. He's somewhere halfway between Marienbad and Prague. When he pulls his battered body out of the trackside ditch and stumbles to the nearby road, well, guess who is parked there in the new Bugatti she fleeced from the oil millionaire? And guess who doesn't seem surprised to see her?

By the way, she didn't know he was on the train, and he had no idea what happened to her.

There is quite a bit of nudity, including the full frontal variety, from Valentina Vargas, who is probably best known as The Girl in "The Name of the Rose".

The movie is on DVD, but is not sold as a separate title. I picked it up in a package which included the immortal cinema classic, "Woman of Desire", with the powerhouse cast of Jeff Fahey, Bo Derek, and a very tired old Robert Mitchum.

IMDB summary: 4.7 out of 10.