FFWD Weekly
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Video by John Tebbutt Geez, it’s been a while since I reviewed some good old-fashioned smut. Time to change that. · Saturday Night Sleazies, Vol. II (1966/1989): Why volume two? Because that’s the only one of the series I’ve been able to get my hands on so far. A hilarious grab-bag of antique smut, this Rhino Home video release is far sillier than you can possibly imagine. It begins with an extremely old silent (!) short that purports to be an "educational" film on how to sunbathe! It’s really just an excuse to watch a woman undress, of course, but although lots of bizarre underthings get removed, she’s still quite covered up by the end. (Underwear was a lot more complicated back in whatever distant century this was filmed. With all those zippers, straps and pulleys, they do not resemble undergarments so much as they do parachutes. I wonder, at exactly what point in human history did underwear manufacturers decide to start making attractive lingerie? They must have eventually realized that people were going to have to look at it.) Antique undies are also on display in the short little black-and-white clips of burlesque dancers doing their thing. These snippets appear randomly throughout the tape, and are the sort of thing that would cause Tom Servo to groan, "I’m being aroused by a woman who’s long dead" in a worried voice. Next comes a trailer for the incredible Ed Wood-scripted Fugitive Girls (1973). It even includes my favourite part of that film: The butch leader of the freshly escaped fugitive girls walks up to a pair of leering chauvinists and knees one of them in the groin. The other guy (in a Sonny Bono-like hairy vest and moustache) shouts, "Good Christ! A lesbian!" The bulk of the tape is taken up by a double feature of ’60s sleaze directed by Stephen Apostolof (a.k.a. A.C. Stevens). For those who don’t know, Apostolof is the spiritual successor of "Worst Director of All Time" Golden Turkey award-winner Edward D. Wood Jr. Towards the end of his career, Ed stopped directing and wrote scripts (such as Orgy of the Dead and the aforementioned Fugitive Girls) that were directed by Apostolof. The results were every bit as ridiculous as Wood’s previous work. (Sure, Wood invented the technique of switching back and forth between day and night shots in the middle of a single scene, but Apostolof did the same thing in blazing colour!) Wood, of course, suffered from delusions of... well, not exactly of grandeur, but at least competence, and he attempted to make Works of Art with important messages in them – which is why his scripts are so funny. Apostolof, on the other hand, was perfectly comfortable with being a pornographer. Feature number one, Lady Godiva Meets Tom Jones, must be seen to be believed. Starting in 18th century England, this would-be bawdy romp eventually winds up in the frontiers of the American west, prompting several of my friends to stand up and exclaim, "No! No! I refuse to believe that Lady Godiva’s famous ride was a ploy to distract one of the combatants in a wild west shootout!!" The softcore sex scenes are enlivened (?) by the director’s trademark "orgasm-cam" technique, in which the camera repeatedly zooms in and out of the faces of the actors as they achieve climax. (It’s even more horrifying than it sounds.) The women all get naked a lot, there’s a big pirate ship that’s obviously a toy being pushed in a bathtub, and a barroom brawl turns into a 10-minute mud-wrestling scene. Amazing. There’s not much the second feature can do to top this, so it settles for being short. Bachelor’s Dream (Naked Dreams of the Naughty Nerd) does away with narrative altogether, and simply follows geeky pervert Abner Biddle as he reads pornography, fantasizes about old burlesque footage, and falls asleep while waiting for his date to get ready.

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