All posts by Ed Donovan

Mega Manor (1987)

Attention, salesmen the world over: One particular bank in Scotland has an incentive program that bests any “president’s club” event. In exchange for your hard work, it buses you to a weeklong retreat at Mega Boob Manor — so named because it’s staffed by women with royally large chests.

The butter-faced ladies pamper and pleasure the guys. They play squash and they squash. They ride exercise bikes and they ride. They soak in Jacuzzis and they soak. They squirt water guns and they squirt. You get the picture. Because individual literal fantasies are catered to, we witness a burglary during a shower, a licking of “fruit and cream from the body of Sally” and an old man’s face getting bitch-slapped by 10 heavy bags of hanging flesh.

Meanwhile, the men’s suspicious wives rightly assume the worst and take revenge by bedding their husbands’ boss. He mercifully puts this wicked monstrosity of mammaries to bed by breaking the fourth wall: “Oh, no, that’s the end.”

All of the above occurs as hamster-wheel instrumentals by The Pync Brothers (whoever they are) blare; just imagine if The Art of Noise were commissioned to score a children’s educational video on farm animals.

Also known by the titillating title of Miss-Adventures at Mega Boob Manor, Mega Manor is the movie equivalent of second base. Despite being directed by UK hardcore pornographer Peter Kay (Carrie Potter and the Philosopher’s Bone), sex is absent from this slab of erotic comedy. There’s so much breast-squeezing, the guys likely got carpal tunnel syndrome. Only three actors — Pat Wynn, Lynda White and Janie Hamilton — allowed their names in the credits. I can’t imagine why. —Ed Donovan

Virtual Girl (1998)

Breed The Lawnmower Man in a three-way with Ghost in the Machine and, oh, Animal Instincts 3, and you still haven’t come close to the direct-to-analog-tape atrocity that is Virtual Girl. The softcore stinker wallows in a league almost to itself: erotic thrillers dependent on immediately dated bleep-blop-bloop internet technology of the late ’90s. All it’s missing is an upon-climax cry of “You’ve got mail!”

From Richard Gabai, the multihyphenate behind 1989’s Assault of the Party Nerds, this li’l flick of tits, bits and bytes begins as a computer-generated sex doll named Virtuality (played with arched, harshly penciled eyebrows by Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo eye candy Charlie Curtis) destroys her program’s creator because what he saw in his lascivious invention wasn’t hearts, but dollar signs.

Enter John Lewis, the studly, happily married man played by a debuting Max Dixon (who not only failed to appear in the 2001 sequel, but every screen project since). As the ace glitch-catcher at the software company where Virtual Girl is under development, John takes the program for a test drive and gets all hot and sweaty — heck, who wouldn’t? — yet is able to resist temptation and Virtuality’s rather comely come-ons. In a movie like this, however, it’s only a matter of time before they’re boning on the regular.

Virtual Girl puts the “seedy” in “CD-ROM” by offering skin, skin and skin in scene after scene. Wanting to pleasure John’s every desire during a roll in the virtual hay, Virtuality full-body morphs into a number of different-looking vixens, each with progressively manmade, awkwardly nippled breasts. He digs it, because he’s not getting any from his wife (Meatballs 4’s Miche Straube). Soon, Virtuality wants him all for herself, so she messes with his home security system, personal computer and bank account, just to show she’s got him by the balls. Fantasy though she may be, this lingerie-clad lady has a murderous streak in her hot bod: One corporate schmo gets his hands melted onto his keyboard; another programmer engaging in cybersex has his head blown off.

Full of cheesy, instantly obsolete computer animations of giant skeletons and spaceships, Gabai’s Girl is one of those movies where a crew member’s last name is listed as “Hughpenis” in the credits, because you just know he’d thought it’d be a real gas. It’s also one of those movies — and this has gotta be a first — where said credits end with a mailing address to which viewers can write and ask questions about the picture. Two decades later, my letter remains unanswered. Damn you, Virtual Girl! —Ed Donovan

Get it at Amazon.

The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man (2003)

Based on the adult comic book Butterscotch by Italian writer/artist Milo Manara, The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man is exactly the Skinemax entry you think it is, but with opening credits appearing in the dreaded Comic Sans typeface.

Having just been dumped by aspiring actress Rachal (Elina Madison, Creepshow 3), aspiring actor Norman (Scott Coppola, not part of Francis Ford’s filmmaking dynasty) nurses a broken heart as he waits tables. At one such gig, his luck changes when he attracts the attention of aspiring actress Kelly (Gabriella Hall, The Exotic Time Machine), but also is rendered invisible after a jug of what looks like buffalo sauce spills on him. Although no one can see Norman, everyone can smell him; several characters detect the scent of butterscotch — sniff out the connection?

To illustrate Norman’s outta-sight shenanigans, writer/director Rolfe Kanefsky (showing none of the promise of his debut film, There’s Nothing Out There) cheaply makes a lot of objects move on their own — telephone, champagne flute, hotel bell, vacuum hose, anal beads — and tears off the occasional outfit from his movie’s interchangeable female bodies. (Exclaims an Italian woman witnessing an instance of the latter, “She’s being uh-raped-uh by a ghost-uh!”)

Much elongated softcore sex ensues, including between Kelly and an invisible Norman, challenging Hall to act petting, tugging and humping something that isn’t there. Master Thespian would be proud.

Misadventures exerts no effort beyond the simulated thrusts and gyrations of its performers. Kanefsky’s cornball dialogue seems to draw inspiration from childrens’ joke books (“Can’t wait to see the look on Kelly’s face when she doesn’t see me!”), and situations that I’m sure had them in stitches on set start flat and fall from there, such as a man in a full duck costume walking into a bar and asking for grapes.

In interest of transparency, I almost laughed once, when a partygoer (Michelle Bauer, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama) hears Kelly’s last name and inquires, “Parkinson? Like the disease?” Yes. —Ed Donovan

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Coed Dorm (1971)

Unless you’re an Uschi Digard completist (and if that’s the case, I salute you), I can’t much recommend Coed Dorm, an ultra-obscure campus comedy in the throbbing vein of Animal House, the National Lampoon classic that looks positively academic by comparison.

The only other picture directed by The Severed Arm’s Thomas S. Alderman, the sexploitationer takes place on the grounds of Farouk University — oft referred to as “Farouk U,” geddit? — where “world-famous gynecologist” Dr. Maurice de Sade (Ray Dannis, The Undertaker and His Pals) teaches sexuality classes, offering to assist all the female students himself with hands-on instruction. One new student (Diane Patton) is a virgin, and she’s named Virgie — geddit?

Her house mother gets naked and gets busy with several men throughout the film, including a fat guy dressed as Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Col. Sanders. At an alumni dinner, guests are shocked — shocked, I tell you! — by the topless girls’ choir (of which Digard’s “Miss Melons” is a member) and by Dr. de Sade treating them all to his dance rendition of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

Oh, and Virgie dies when she falls from a hospital window. Now that’s comedy!

More boring than titillating, Coed Dorm is such a rarity that Something Weird Video’s print doesn’t even have credits. To make up for it, they include their usual generous helping of nudie-cutie shorts, one of which — Double Trouble, in which a guy mixes up twin sisters — has more plot than the feature. —Ed Donovan

Get it at Something Weird Video.

Hey! There’s Naked Bodies on My TV! (1979)

Nowadays, just about every blockbuster of note gets a simultaneous X-rated “parody.” Remember when your favorite ABC sitcoms of the 1970s got similar treatment? No? Well, it happened to Barney Miller, Happy Days and Welcome Back, Kotter, poor things — all three sword-skewered in one crappy softcore comedy called Hey! There’s Naked Bodies on My TV! Whether it should have happened is debatable. I think it’s obscure for good reason.

Because every good (and bad) anthology requires something to tie them all together, a janitor stops sweeping floors to watch some television. Not to spoil anything, but his presumably favorite shows all have sex on the brain. Checking out the boob tube throws the man for such a loop, he literally — and worriedly — looks to the camera and yells this movie’s title. But of course he keeps watching.

In the first show, Happy Daze, cool dude The Bonz introduces Putzie and pals to easy women who will take their virginity. In the second, Don’t Come Back Kotler, cool teacher Mr. Kotler introduces Vinnie Malatestes and pals to easy women who will take their virginity. The third and final segment, Bernie Milner, shakes things up by having the cops not be virgins, but easy women (including Flesh Gordon’s Candy Samples) are part of the formula. (Old, dirty cartoons in rickety shape play in between.)

As if you needed telling, jokes are sub-Catskills at best. That writer/director Mack Campbell (probably a pseudonym) uses the same laugh track as the actual series is a creative choice that goes from amusing to unsettling lickety-split. With the primary purpose of Hey! being to ogle female flesh, it plays like the pages of a Tijuana bible come to life, but written by kids on the playground. Those kids missed a good pun by not having the fake shows be produced by “Norman Leer,” but at least they didn’t miss the opportunity to give proper context to the Fonz’s trademark “Sit on it!” —Ed Donovan

Get it at Amazon.