Roseland - 1971

Fredric Hobbs is one of those cult filmmakers who you either get it or you don't. His movies may appear to be just a few of the thousands of low budget genre films being cranked out in the 70's, upon closer inspection you'll find a whole world of mutant sheep, mystic ganja, ghost magicians, frankenstein vampires, mind control, race relations, voodoo, naked hippies, weirdly sculptural cars, a black Hieronymus Bosch and quirky sexual peccadilloes. I'm a little obsessed with him and I'm so happy to finally be able to review the last of his three accessible films, Roseland.

By far Hobbs' most sexually driven story. It follows a man named Adam (played by Hobbs alumni E. Kerrigan Prescott) who's become obsessed with voyeurism after studying the painting The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. He's unable to perform sexually so he steals porno reels and becomes a bonafide peeping tom. His obsession has ruined his career as a singer so he now spends hours in a therapist's chair trying to come to terms with his problems. Roseland, like all of Hobbs films, takes many creative liberties. Adam's hypno-therapy puts him in a deep state of sleep where we see an expressive nudist hippie dream sequence in slow motion. Extended even more with Adam and a particular girl rolling around naked in a filtered softcore love scene. Not the most interesting part of the film, but relevant. There's also the infamously amazing song and dance flashback where Adam and his band perform "You Cannot Fart Around with Love", which is one of the more endearing moments in the film. I like when it becomes clear that although an experimental filmmaker, Hobbs isn't taking himself TOO seriously.

Watch PLEASE.

Our hero Adam, also know as the Black Bandit for his porn thievery, gets a job in the box office of a burlesque theater where we get to see a very raunchy strip-tease from a lady performer and and even more entertaining strip-tease by Adam himself where he's shimmies down to nothing but a pair of lacy panties. He's inevitably hauled off to a metal institution where he seduces nurses which I suppose would mean he's cured of his little problem, thought it's never directly addressed. A black Hieronymus Bosch appears (played by Christopher Brooks, another Hobbs alumni) and begins explaining everything to Adam in a very poetic, somewhat irrational Hobbsian way. Simply put, the reason Adam was so drawn to the Garden of Earthly Delights is because it is Adam's future. Adam is intended to be ADAM (of Adam and Eve fame) after the impending apocalypse which is sure to happen because of how shitty we treat our planet. Gotta love the eco-political undertones. We're then propelled into the future where the evil therapist is flying overhead in a plane spraying some kind of poisoned gas into the air where Adam's nudist hippie fantasy was taking place, only this time it's real? Everyone dies except Adam and his fantasy Eve (the girl he was rolling around with) who float away on a giant phallic rose, making love, probably repopulating the human race.

Hobbs films appeal to a very small audience. Look up reviews for any of these. Roseland, Godmonster of Indian Flats or Alabama's Ghost (you can find my reviews for the other films HERE and HERE, and mentioned in my review for Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is a conversation I had with his editor Richard Brummer). His style doesn't jive with a lot of people's taste.  He's definitely trying to convey a message with these films and being that they are also b-movies, that can be difficult to get across to an audience. You really have to have a strong appreciation for both low budget and outsider cinema to dig Hobbs' work. The ability to suspend disbelief doesn't hurt either. The political aspects of his films haven't moved me much, most likely from such a huge generational gap. The strong imagery and artistic stylings hold it all together in a way I can only loosely compare to the work of Russ Meyer and Andy Milligan. I enjoy seeing the same cast return for each film as well. I mentioned in my review for Alabama's Ghost that E. Kerrigan Scott was a personal favorite of mine. Roseland has secured a place in my heart for that guy. I just love seeing his bearded face, and you can tell her really loved making these movies. 

He would have to love making these movies to let Hobbs put a rose in his anus.

I'm not sure where I would rank Roseland in correlation with the other two Hobbs films I've seen. As a general rule I tire of sex scenes quickly.  Roseland is a little different. It FEELS different and the gonzoid plot kept me completely captivated. They're all so unique, atmospheric and wonderful. I know this will probably be the last Fredric Hobbs review I do for a while, if ever again. His remaining films are near impossible to locate. I'm currently trying to track down a copy of his film Troika from 1969. I've spoken to a few people who have seen it so I know there are copies floating around out there somewhere*, hopefully one day I'll be able to experience it myself. I have little hope for ever finding his first film "Trojan Horse" (1967), a documentary on the creation of one of his parade sculptures. His website also cites a final film from 1978 called "The Richest Place on Earth", which I had previously read was a book he co-wrote and illustrated. Not sure if that's misinformation or if he actually made a film based on the book. 

I wish there was a bigger following for Fredric Hobbs. His films and artwork deserve more exposure. I'm just happy to have experienced these three wonderful films that have become pivotal pieces in my huge cannon of movies I'm obsessed with. Something Weird no longer carries Roseland so if you're lucky enough to find a copy, give it a spin and let me know what you think.

*If anyone knows where I can find a copy of  Troika, I will make it worth your while.

Starlet (1969)

This movie felt like a swan song of sorts. The tragic end of the marathon and also somewhat cheekily autobiographical. Starlet is about the adult movie industry, more specifically the production of Nudies. A young devil-may-care softcore pornstress is easily swayed into going hardcore by her sleazy director Phil Latio (yep).  She sleeps her way to the top becoming more and more successful. The role of the sordid producer is played by Russ Meyer alumni Stuart Lancaster. He's got that whole slimy thing down pat. She has two roommates, one a slutty free love bleach blonde Liza Minelli look-alike who runs around in a short smock and no underwear AT ALL. Her other roommate is much more prudent. An "actress" who's ironically engaged to a smut director. She also has one of the weirdest birthmarks I've ever seen, I kept thinking there was spilled wine on her chest.

There's a lot of betrayal, hard feelings and general diva antics. Considering this was the last film in the marathon I was feeling pretty much rung out to dry. Completely desensitized to humping and hijinks, this marginally entertaining depiction of casting couch film making was about as un-sexy as Blood Feast. The acting is fair and the plot holds your attention but I was a bit underwhelmed with this one. I see what they were doing here and it was a noble attempt but next to Space Thing, Starlet is my least favorite of the bunch. Which makes sense because that would be book ending the festival with the weaker movies that only the die hards could bravely survive.

Director Richard Kanter did several blue movies in the 60's and 70's including Thar She Blows, The Erotic Adventures of Robin Hood (both Friedman) and Wild Riders. The Starlet herself, Shari Mann didn't do much else outside of Pussycat Sexploitation. She does offer an interesting take on a character you might otherwise find undignified. She plays Alison Jordan AKA "Starliss Knight" very cool. Her shrewdness could almost be viewed as wisdom considering her bold career moves campily made everyone rich and happy in the end.

In summary, this event is one to be cherished. With it's ups and downs it was an over all success. An amazing turn out and a thoroughly entertaining experience I'm proud to be apart of. Honestly, I'm a little impressed with myself for making it through the whole damn thing. As I mentioned in my introduction, I've never watched 7 movies in a row before. Let alone in a theater in rapid succession. It made a man out of me and I have the New Beverly and the course the late David F. Friedman to thank for that.

(R.I.P December 24th 1923 - February 14th 2011)

A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine (1966)

This movie is essentially about the dangers of being a cock tease. Stacey Walker plays Sharon Winters, a tempestuous sex pot who gets her kicks by luring men (and women) into thinking she's going to go all the way with them. The movie begins with a hot and heavy make out session in a car that's about to take a turn for the penetrative. She's nude, he's aroused and suddenly she starts telling him to stop. He won't, he's too worked up for that. There's a struggle then right as the title appears Sharon pops up and screams "RAPE!". This opening sequence is a very memorable one, and a wonderful introduction to our main character. A cop comes to her aid and the boy gets arrested and is sentenced to several years in a boot camp. My first thought at this point in the movie is that this will be her decent into whorishness.

Earlier in the David F. Friedman marathon they had shown a trailer for A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine where she is repeatedly referred to as "the worst kind of woman". The men in the audience are warned to avoid women like Sharon Winters, and the women are urged to see what she is so that we can be glad we're not like her. The trailer goes on to state the debauchery we're to bare witness too, and we're shown examples with scenes of Miss Winters being whipped while chained up in a dark room and performing fellatio on a coke bottle. I basically expected her to be the biggest slut ever. Boy was I wrong...

After the trial Sharon seems unscathed and quite pleased with herself. She lays half naked on her bed and talks to her lesbian roommate in a very suggestive conversation which dances around the subject of desires for one another. Sharon goes on to tell her roommate that she has a date with a boring guy from the office and that she's in for an uneventful night. When her date arrives, you can immediately see he's uncomfortable with her forth rightness. He's a fuddy duddy and brings a nice little gift for Sharon, who's wearing nothing but a bathrobe. She pours him a giant tumbler full of rum and invites him upstairs so he can "talk to her" while she takes a bath. Cleverly positioned, we can see her undressing slowly for the camera in the mirror. He's becoming more and more uncomfortable. She gets out and lays on her bed asking him if he's ever made love to a woman. He's timid but ultimately accepts her forward invitation. After all of this prolonged stimuli you're kind of ready for them to have sex, but sure enough, what happens? "Stop it! I'm a virgin, stop! RAPE!". The first scenario left a lot to speculation but after this poor sap you begin to see that she's kind of just a crazy bitch. She laughs as he runs for the door, never to be seen again.

Her next victim is her own roommate who's been lusting after Sharon for a long time. She obliges her in some girl on girl touchy-feely time but invariably reacts the same way when things get a little too steamy. This scene ends with the famous line "I may be a bitch, but I'll never be a butch", with her kicking her roommates ass to the curb.

The next victim is my favorite. A new co-worker, Lowell Carter, a handsome all around good guy. He's instantly attracted to her and they begin to date. She plays it cool at first, obviously wanting to extend her fun. Long kisses at the end of the night, and he's very respectable. He takes his blue balls and leaves in peace. Then he begins to have very salacious and quite violent dreams about Sharon. This is where most of the trailer footage comes from. Her being chained and whipped by him, and then the reverse, her with devilish make-up in sex black undies whipping him. My favorite scene is in one of these dreams. He's sitting at a bar, shaky, smoking a cigarette while she's stripping coming at him from the other end of the long stretch. She takes off her top and we see these ridiculously huge pasties that look like giant black nipples. The look on his face really sums up our feeling watching all of this go one. At that point you're pretty much ready for Sharon to just screw someone, and who better than poor Lowell. He's been so nice and I actually started to believe that he meant it when he said that he was falling in love with her. Her manipulative games planted this ugly seed of aggression in his mind, eventually bringing out his violent urges which explodes on screen in a way I'll resist from mentioning as to not engage in too many spoilers.

Lowell was an ok guy, and that was the most extended tease yet. After he's out of the picture, how could we go on? Well, let's just say she meets her match and her life is altered, forcibly, and in a very ironic way. If not so comically fitting, it's bruteness could be mistaken for chauvinistic. You can't really think in those terms as far as sexploitaton movies go, or David F. Friedman for that matter. Sharon Winters really could be considered "the worst kind of woman" but not for the reasons I would have automatically assumed. This is a very erotic and stylish film. I was pleasantly surprised by it's steady incline of tension and the amusing outcome. This was my favorite movie in this film fest of the ones I had not already seen (stay tuned for my review of Blood Feast) and was a perfect choice for the middle slot, as it perked me up for the remaining films. Stacey Walker was charming, funny, had a great/bad laugh and teetered between being sexy and skanky perfectly. She spends most of the movie being naked or half dressed and yet there is relatively no sex at all. This is a very special roughie, possibly my all time favorite of the genre and I give it my utmost recommendation! I'll be buying my own copy very soon!

Stick around, there's more to come in this David F. Friedman marathon. Next we take a break from sex and focus on what made the Godfather of Gore infamous in BLOOD FEAST <3

Space Thing (1968)

I'm just going to go ahead and say it. This was the weakest movie in the marathon. That's probably why they showed it first at 3pm to the sparse audience of early comers. That's still speaking highly of this entire event because I did quite enjoy it.

A man obsessed with sci-fi magazines finds himself bored with his horny wife, when she complains about the magazines coming in between them he puts them down momentarily to take us into a long awkward sex scene (the first of many I would see in the course of the next 12 hours). Post coitus he immediately starts gazing at his beloved science fiction comics again and without notice we're taken into a world of fantasy where our bored husband is posing as an alien (a human looking alien) to infiltrate an enemy space ship which just happens to be crawling with half nude women. They all of course find him irresistible and are itching to get him alone for, um, probing?

"Visit The Planet Of the Rapes!"  - HA! How misleading!

The movie doesn't really go anywhere. Its known as "the worst sci-fi movie ever made with nudity", which I think is an accurate description, although Doris Wishman's Nude on the Moon is viable contender. There's something very Ed Wood feeling about this movie. The forced dialog carries out the half assed plot humorously. The protagonist constantly reminds the audience of his revulsion to these femaliens, but how he MUST complete his mission. The few other men on the ship are apparently inadequate. The captain is a sexy dominatrix, she of course eventually comes around and wants to sleep with him too.

The sex scenes are the most boring part of the movie. They aren't really having sex, just making out. The girl is naked, the guy usually isn't, they lay side by side on a space bed and do this for for at least five minutes at a time. I would notice over the course of the evening that this is David F. Friedman's choice manner in which he exploits sex. More like suggestive dry humping if you ask me. The aspects that make some of these movies raunchy aren't the "sex", it's the prolonged foreplay. At the beginning of Space Thing for example, there's a painfully long scene where his wife is licking his, um...something hairy...I never really figured out what. It just looked like she had a mouth full of hair. It was truly revolting!

I loved that the opening credits of Space Thing were painted on a female body.

The climax of the movie, which is set in the desert (supposedly an alien planet), is mostly the girls topless running around the barren rocky landscape. It also features the most laughably ineffective "explosion" I've ever seen in a  movie.

This review is running a little short, but it was a very short movie! I'm glad I was able to catch it at the theater. I would have never sought it out myself and being just barely over and hour it was a nice aperitif for the main attractions.

A Tribute to David F. Friedman

I was lucky enough to attend a 12 hour David Friedman retrospective last Saturday at the New Beverly. There are several reasons this occasion was very special. New Bev's celebrity tributes are always heart warming and sincere, no matter how sleazy the films are. There's an enthusiam amongst the audience and staff that creates creates a comfortable environment for movie fanatics alike. Then there's the movies themselves, beautifully unrestored in all of their 33mm glory. Whether you have a penchant for cult movies or classics, the New Beverly really delivers the bacon.

David F. Friedman was always just a name I saw on my H.G. Lewis movies or peppered in my Something Weird catalogs. I noticed that he produced mostly nudies, which based on what I've seen from other schlockmiesters isn't a very exciting genre. Mildly (at best) entertaining plots sparsely inserted between painfully drawn out soft core sex scenes. This prevented me from digging much deeper than my beloved Herschell's filmography. Although Friedman was a blip on my cinematic radar, my fandom definitely came to fruition with the passing of this phenomenal tribute.

When I saw the advertisement on the flyer, only a few of the films had been announced. I was mostly excited about Blood Feast. It's been one of my favorites for years and the prospects of seeing it in the theater seemed too good to be true. I've taken a lot of time off of work recently for various events so I decided to leave this one up to fate. If I got the day off, great. If not, oh well. As chance would have it, I got the day off. My husband unfortunately didn't so it looked like I was flying solo. I thought about just catching three or four of the movies, then realized that it didn't make sense to only see a few when I had the whole night clear and this was kind of a once in a lifetime event. So I showed up at 3pm for the first movie, Space Thing, which you can expect a review for shortly.

I walked in knowing relatively nothing about David F. Friedman, after 12 hours and several guest speakers telling stories I felt like we were good friends. I feel kind of blindsided by this whole aspect of exploitation which is slightly embarrassing considering it's been staring me in the face for years. So I'm writing this blog to set up my next 7 reviews. That's right, I'm reviewing each every one of the films that were burned into my retinas during that 12 hour period. I've never watched that many movies in one sitting before. Four, maybe five at my most obsessive during a period of unemployment. This whole event has really swept me away. I've felt strange and on some kind of smut movie high for days. That could also be the head cold I caught from sitting confined place breathing the same stale air as 50 or so other people for 12 hours. Yuck. Totally worth it, and even perhaps fitting?

So here's the line up...

Space Thing (1968)
Scum of the Earth (1963)
She Freak (1967)
A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine (1966)
Blood Feast (1963)
The Pick-Up (1968)
Starlet (1969)

I'm going to try and review them straight through, as to not get distracted by other movies I may watch before I complete this task. Be sure to check back, I should have my review for Space Thing up before the night is over.

<3