Directed By: Achem A. Krovek
Starring: Pat Bolin, Karen Moore, Vicki Miles, Mardge London,
Not quite a blast, here’s a puff of bad breath from the past. An “educational” film lost for forty years, meaning someone failed to bury it deep enough in the late sixties.
The Movie
A narrator starts out the movie setting the scene as the credits roll. The animated credits are cute enough but hard to read as if even at the time everyone involved were a little bit ashamed to associate their names with this train wreck.
The story is about three young women out for a weekend at a resort in the woods ran by an old maid. The narrator is the deceased husband of the resort owner and seems to take as much glee in insulting his widow as he does in watching the three young women cavort around in their birthday suits. Nearly the whole film is just setups for the three young women to take off their clothes, which happens three times before they even get to the resort. They do manage to keep their clothes on during the aerial tour and the fishing trip though. The three young women are attractive enough but the nude scenes are just weird. You can tell from the way everything is posed that there are lines that could not be crossed making everything seem staged and awkward. One particularly uncomfortable scene has one of the women squirming around on a leather couch like she’s trying to satisfy an itch, and I don’t mean an “nudge, nudge, know what I mean, say no more” kind of itch, while awkwardly playing with a pillow to keep certain attributes of her figure covered. For all of the nudity everything is weirdly sexless except for the innuendo from the narrator.
Given that nudity is the selling point behind this movie there is a large amount of time where the three young women have their clothes on or where they are not even on camera. One extended scene involves the old maid who runs the camp taking them on a flight in a small plane where she proceeds lose her mind and thinks she’s flying to the moon. Her dead husband, the narrator, then hails her on the radio disguising himself as Cape Canaveral and proceeds to talk her down. Actually this scene’s sheer oddity made it one of my favorites of the whole movie, but it all just narration and bad aerial photography.
The idea that this is an “educational” film is weird. This is not a fake documentary. I think that this had to be an attempt to market the movie in the faux documentary “educational” genre that was the only way to release racy material at the time. Of course I could just be trying to rationalize how something this dull could ever have been thought of as racy or dangerous.
1/10
The Video
The film is presented in full screen format in black and white. The print used for the transfer is serviceable. There are several thin continuous scratches that run the length of the film, along with other small blemishes that pop up here and there. There are a number of jumps in the film. It happens often enough that it could be something the editor was doing purposely or it could be where projectionists cut out damaged frames. On the bright side the actual transfer seems to be excellent. I did not notice any compression artifacts of digital defects.
6/10
The Audio
The audio is presented in the original mono. The only dialog comes from the narrator and the old maid. It’s mixed well with the score by Werner Blix, which is that light bouncy variety of Jazz that’s just slightly more interesting than Muzak. There is only one speaking character but her dialog does not sync, not even close, it’s as if it was dubbed from another language.
6/10
The Packaging and Bonus Features
The DVD comes in a standard Amaray case with simple artwork derived from the film. The menu has two options. The film and “Other Titles” which is just a slide show of movie posters.
1/10
There are a few bad old movies that are so far over on the bad scale they wrap around the other side to a kind of idiot savant genius range on the movie continuum, the classic example being Ed Woods Plan Nine from Outer Space. I think this is where this movie is supposed to fall but I just don’t see it. It’s just a bad, bad movie. I suppose there is some kitsch value to this but what I find more interesting than the actual film is thinking about the society that would produce a market for this (actually that might be what kitsch means).
Overall (Not an Average) 3/10
The Review
The Movie 1/10
The Video 6/10
The Audio 6/10
The Packaging and Bonus Features 1/10
Overall (Not an Average) 3/10