Parents are in a wadded-panty uproar over Ms. Barrington (Pamela Rhea) teaching their high schoolers the birds and the bees and the birth control pill in class. Meddling complaints to the pushover principal (Otto Schlessinger, Flesh Feast) force Ms. B to stop dispensing carnal knowledge or face the school board’s wrath.
But if mum’s the word, “mom” will result, Ms. Barrington reasons. Her solution is to hold the S-E-X lectures at her home on Friday nights, as long as the students have parent-signed permission slips. She’s so naive, mass forgery doesn’t even cross her well-intentioned mind.
Meanwhile, good girl Alice Nichols (Kay Ross) is madly in love with a classmate (James Nelson). He’s an upstanding young man, as his sport coat’s professorial elbow patches signal; nonetheless, Alice’s ill-tempered pop (Bill Rogers, Love Goddesses of Blood Island) is like a junkyard dog on 24/7 hymen protection.
Meanwhile meanwhile, ever the hypocrite, Mr. Nichols is having an affair with the trampy single mother (Valedia Hill) of trampy student Randy (Nancy Lee Noble, Loose Shoes). Randy’s secretly stealing her mom’s birth control pills and subbing them with saccharine tablets on the regular. So you know what happens next, right? Pat yourself on the back if you guessed “couch abortion.”
Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, a 40-something senior (Roy Collodi, The Gruesome Twosome) is so hormonally supercharged after weeks of absorbing the hot Ms. B’s hot syllabus of hot sex talk, he tries to rape her.
How is Herschell Gordon Lewis’ The Girl, the Body, and the Pill not held in high esteem like his Blood trilogy? Its soapy, dopey mix of teensploitation and sexploitation proves irresistible to me, but I suspect its lack of imagery to trigger an R rating has something to do with that. By this point in his career, Lewis had, for example, removed a woman’s tongue in gory detail. In contrast, this film is as harmless as How to Make a Doll, another Lewis premise that sounds readymade for showing you things you hadn’t seen.
Regardless, this not-bitter Pill does more than its share of onscreen envelope-pushing. Louise Downe’s script is boldly progressive for its time (and, I would argue, today’s regressive times). Consider this a feature-length version of the postwar era’s classroom shorts designed to scare students into abstinence, but without the shock photos of, say, syphilitic genitalia in all their weeping-sore glory. —Rod Lott