Posts tagged 1970s

By Dan Kinem



It’s been way too long since the last sex comedy review, and what better way to kick it off then with the radical, racy, and reckless, Summer School! The whole three R’s thing doesn’t actually work for me. I would much rather go with my own list (which you need to learn, ‘cause there’ll be a test on it), “The Five B’s”… Babes, boobs, butts, bikinis, and beaches! All of which this movie is loaded with.



You know you’re off to a good start when a bunch of teens pull up in a van and go sprinting onto the beach and bust into a free-for-all frisbee match. No holds barred. Teens are diving, ripping off bikini tops in that fun, free-spirited sexual harassment kind of way, and getting mouthfuls of sand in the process. That’s how you know it’s intense. They even cut high school to do it. Our two leads are Steve (John Laughlin’s first role) and Anita (Shelly Horner’s only role). They don’t know each other, but fall in love instantly while at the beach. It’s no surprise why Steve likes her… she has huge boobs. You know who else has boobs, though? Steve’s girlfriend, who doesn’t take kindly to this new bitch’s flirtatious ways. She vows to ruin Anita’s life. And pretty much succeeds.



Now I should get this out of the way. I will never understand the whole 70s van culture, especially after seeing this movie. Correct me if I’m wrong, but, according to this movie, there were gangs of girls who were obsessed with pickup trucks and gangs of guys who were obsessed with vans, and they often would get in violent altercations because of it? This seems highly unlikely and completely ridiculous, which is why I like it so much.

Anita has it really hard, and I mean really, really hard. In her first week at her new job she gets raped by the sleazeball boss because she asks for her check, then Steve’s girlfriend and her friends chase Anita with their van and try to kill her by running her off the road, then she gets home and her dad flips out on her and won’t believe anything she tells him. Don’t worry, it gets worse. Her and Steve are hitting it off, despite the fact Steve still has a girlfriend. They go to a creek to make out and, of course, Steve tries to feel her up. She stops him, but he keeps forcing it. She says she doesn’t want to do it, so he “romantically” throws her into the creek and forces her to have sex.



Steve is as sexist and sleazy as they come. He not only basically forced Anita to have sex with him while he still is dating someone, he also delivered this brilliant exchange of ideas:

Steve: Chicks aren’t supposed to be tough!
Random girl: Why not?!
Steve: ‘Cause guys won’t like ‘em.
Random girl: I get laid once in a while.
Steve: If chicks were supposed to be tough, God would have given them muscles.
Random girl: We got muscles where it counts!

Did the head writer for Hustler magazine pen this movie?!



Steve’s idiotic girlfriend finds out they had sex, so she lies to the cops and says Steve is selling coke. When the cops bust Steve, she blames it on Anita. Instead of asking Anita if it’s true or confronting her, he and all of his friends RAPE HER. They literally have a high speed chase which involves jumping between the vans and pickups and crossing ropes, then they throw Anita to the ground and rip all of her clothes off and rape her.

In school the next day they happen to be discussing rape, which makes all of the people involved start arguing and results in a huge cat fight between Steve’s girlfriend and Anita, which Anita gets blamed and expelled for. Then, the pickup girls decide to have a “drag out” with the guys, which apparently is a tug o’ war between cars across a giant pit. The loser fucking dies. Yeah, this movie got even more fucking insane, but it doesn’t stop there. Anita still has feelings for Steve and in order to stop the rival gangs from killing one another, she drives her fucking car into the pit to commit suicide. Steve runs down there to see if she’s okay and finds out she’s still barely alive. Everyone jumps in the air because she is still breathing, and the movie ends. Yep, you heard me right. This is one of the most insane and fucked-up movies I’ve ever seen. I could not believe my eyes when I saw this suicide attempt or when I found out Anita still liked Steve after he raped her twice and almost killed all of her friends. I applaud this movie for being so ridiculous and highly recommend it to anyone into cult/exploitation cinema.



Summer School is also known as Mag Wheels (terrible title), and was the last movie from one of my favorite directors, Bethel Buckalew, and with a name like that it’s no surprise he got his start in the 70s directing hixploitation sex comedies like Midnight Plowboy, Country Cuzzins, and The Pigkeeper’s Daughter. In all of his movies he comes across as one of the most misogynistic, sexist, sleazeballs ever, but damn does he make entertaining films.

The movie is actually fairly rare on VHS and hard to come by. It was released in a big box through Active Home Video and has that fantastic cover art. Active tried to promote this like a straight-up hilarious comedy and even compared it to Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. This movie is nothing like either of those. It’s in a category all by itself and honestly no one should try to compare it to anything. The movie was released on DVD in a Drive-In Grindhouse four-movie pack, with The Farmer’s Other Daughter, Psychedelic Fever, and Up Yours. I’d go with this VHS, though, because you not only get the great cover, you also get an excellent trailer reel from Active (linked at the bottom).

This movie literally has everything: rape, car chases, an original rock soundtrack by the band The Word, a nerdy pledge who gets paddled, pinball, skateboarding, and of course, The Five B’s. What were those again? You were supposed to fucking learn them! Babes, boobs, butts, bikinis, and beaches! What’s so hard to understand?! Go see this movie.

(The trailer features some great nudity!)

(Source: vhshitfest.com)

by Dan Kinem

I don’t think I’ve ever been more lied to or misled in my life. Someone could have told me I was about to eat a delicious steak with A1 sauce and instead it could be a turd covered in Pepsi sauce and it wouldn’t even hold a candle to this. It’s so mind-blowing that I actually have to give props to Magnum Entertainment for their disregard of the audience entirely and their no-care-in-the-world attitude. The Night After Halloween is nothing like what the title, plot synopsis, and cover art paint it to be. In fact, I would be very interested in seeing the statistics on how many of these tapes were never returned to video stores because they were smashed into tiny pieces and flushed down the toilet for lying. What you expect to get from this movie is a rip-off or pseudo-sequel to Halloween, but what you get is an Australian drama called Shapshot (aka One More Minute) that doesn’t come close to even mentioning the holiday of Halloween let alone being a slasher movie!

The movie follows a young snaggle-toothed hairdresser who is down on her luck and needs her big break. One day she is dragged out of the salon she works at by a rich “model” and promised a lot of money for a photo shoot. It turns out she has to do a “cologne” ad on the beach in the middle of winter… naked. This would be amazing if she wasn’t as flat as a road-killed opossum. She’s even somewhat cute in that Kirsten Dunst I-have-fucked-up-teeth-and-don’t-get-braces-because-I’m-too-good-kind-of-way, but her lack of boobage makes the many nudes scenes she’s in about as exciting as staring at my flabby body in the mirror.

Later you find out her ex-boyfriend follows her around in an ice cream truck (only reminds me of how great Phantasm is) because he just can’t get enough of her body. She starts raking in the dough and hanging out with the big stuff when all of a sudden she realizes every guy is just looking for sex. BIG SURPRISE. Even the women are looking to get in her pants. All the “model” that hooked her up with her first job wants is a little poon but Miss Prude won’t give it up. She throws her off and never sees her again. Or does she?

Her boyfriend won’t leave her alone still and is reluctant to give up until he has her back, but she still isn’t going for it. She actually becomes scared because after the 37^th rejection he decides to cut the head off a pig and tuck it into her bed sheets. Trying to confide in someone she goes to her photographer’s (?) house and finds out he is more than just her picture-taker, he’s her obsesser. The entire room is decorated with her mosquito bites (see above). She tries to escape but he gets her held down and begins raping her, like any crazed killer oughta. The whole place catches on fire because the guy’s camera basically explodes and before the house crumbles to the ground she kills the man by booting him into the flames (in a decently effective man-on-fire scene) . She leaves the room and storms away from the scene of the crime with her boyfriend, who was standing helpless outside of the door like a little baby instead of trying to kick it down and save her. Here’s where the movie gets good for a few minutes. The couple run away and as they get far enough from the fire you see that friendly and familiar ice cream truck barreling down the street and SPLAT!, the truck smashes her boyfriend to pieces and out comes the lesbo “model”. Credits.

Much closer to a super poor man’s Peeping Tom then to Carpenter’s Halloween. This is one of the biggest disappointments of my young life and will always stay with me, not because of the movie’s quality or lackthereof, but because of it’s incredibly bizarre marketing. This has nothing to do with the holiday Halloween in the slightest! If you want a mildly competent drama/thriller that bores more than it thrills then this movie is perfect. But if you want anything even slightly resembling a slasher stay far away from this diarrhea dump.

Thank you Magnum, you straight up raped me.

NOTE: Also, in a very strange coincidence this movie and Halloween were released on the exact same day in Australia. Could that have been what connected these two completely unrelated movies together and made someone decide on the name switch? And there’s another release of this by Catalina Home Video, but they at least had the decency to call it The Day After Halloween, which makes you still think slasher, but not quite as much.

(Source: vhshitfest)

by Tim May

Ovidio G. Assonitis is credited for this film and for the earlier VHShitfest film, Beyond the Door, as Oliver Hellman. He seems to specialize in making rip-offs of big Hollywood hits. For Beyond the Door, it was The Exorcist. For Tentacles, it’s Jaws.

I’m a huge fan of Jaws rip-offs. This fondness most likely stems from my undying love for the original film, but I definitely have an affinity for films like Orca and Piranha. Even Russell Mulcahy’s Razorback is a Jaws rip-off of sorts. Tentacles is one of the worst I’ve ever seen.

Hellman was able to wrangle up a decent cast for this movie, not the least of which being the great John Huston. He seems so completely and utterly bored here. Ready to die.

After Beyond the Door, I expected at least some visual flair from Hellman. No such luck. Tentacles has all the visual interest of a Brett Ratner flick.

The film did have one hilarious exchange:

“I know what did this.”

“You thinking sharks?”

“No…giant octopus.”

by Tim May

This is a bit of a departure from what we normally do at VHShitfest, but it was too good to pass up. I had absolutely no idea there was a Spider-Woman cartoon, despite possessing what I thought was relatively extensive knowledge of Marvel Comics.

Spider-Woman was never a character I paid much attention to, so any ignorance of auxiliary characters should be noted. When the episode began, there was a photographer who looked almost exactly like Peter Parker. This, of course, led me to believe that he was Peter Parker. I was mistaken. He was actually a character named Jeff, who is legitimately hilarious throughout the entire episode.

Spider-Woman AKA Jessica Drew is apparently a newspaper reporter, so she goes to cover the Olympics with Jeff. Some shit goes down with some stereotypical Russian villains, and she saves the day. Here’s a couple of the villains’ cronies.

Spider-Woman is incessantly making stupid fucking spider-puns like, “Sizzling Spider Bites!” or “I better make a fast spider-change before I get caught web-handed!” After Jessica infiltrates the Olympic games and poses as an athlete (an airtight plan), she’s replaced by a robot (some dastardly plan of the villains). When she gives Jeff the cold shoulder, he says, hilariously, “She’s probably just upset because she knows she’s going to lose.”

The tape had a bonus episode of the not-too-well-known 1980 Spider-Man cartoon. This show is actually pretty good!

Spider-Woman is a pretty typical 1970s action cartoon: cheesy, not too exciting, but entirely watchable and fun. Jeff is a legitimately funny character, and the shot of those two cronies above is one of the funniest things ever.

by Tim May

To go along with the hilarious beach party movie, The Beach Girls, we thought we’d watch a hopefully hilarious slumber party movie. Ugh. Slumber Party ‘57 is about a bunch of girls, possibly even more slutty than the ones from The Beach Girls, having a slumber party and telling the stories of how each of them lost their virginity.

All of these girls have absolutely ridiculous stories that make them look like the most dick-hungry whores ever. The first one has sex with her cousin, the second, a middle aged dude (she’s reading Lolita during the sequence—how clever). The next girl is the only one with an even remotely normal story: she fucks some dude she just met after he beats the shit out of some muggers.

The next girl has the funniest story. She goes to some horse ranch with a friend of her’s and her friend’s brother. She proceeds to fuck her friend’s brother in a barn while she watches and gets jealous! Haha! What the fuck is wrong with the women in this film? All they want to do is fuck. Obviously written by a middle aged man (or Dan Kinem).

None of the other girls believe the next girl, who claims to have had sex with a famous actor. When she admits to it, all of them admit to at least exaggerating a bit in their stories. I don’t know if this means they were all virgins, or if the stories were just a bit more ridiculous than the reality.

The one girl who never even claimed to have had sex was missing in that last scene, and all the other girls ran upstairs and discovered her getting gang-banged by something like ten or twelve dudes. The fucking end.

Slumber Party ‘57 is completely incompetent, with random wipes being used in the middle of scenes, musical montages obviously created only because they didn’t record sound properly, and just general atrociousness. The soundtrack was nice though, but I could just buy any five dollar “oldies” compilation or watch American Graffiti if I wanted to listen to most of these songs.