Hoping to follow AIP’s Beach Party to a box-office bonanza, Warner Bros. made its own film following that hit’s formula with one glaring exception: setting it nowhere near a beach. In fact, Palm Springs Weekend posits that each Easter weekend, horny college students from Los Angeles would rather flock to the California desert county for “sex, sand and suds.” Technically speaking, viewers get one out of the three.
That Scorchy Connie Stevens takes second billing as Gayle, an 18-year-old posing as 21. Vying for her affections are rich asshole Eric (Robert Conrad, then fresh from TV’s Hawaiian Eye with Stevens) and Texas good ol’ boy Stretch (Ty Hardin, 1967’s Berserk). Also converging at the same hotel — at which no one has reservations — is L.A.’s top collegiate basketball team, including a lemon-faced, banjo-strumming goofball named Biff (Jerry Van Dyke, TV’s Coach) and a future doctor (Phantom Gunslinger Troy Donahue) who takes kindly to the local chief of police’s daughter, Bunny (a brunette Stefanie Powers, Die! Die! My Darling!).
Directed by Sergeant Dead Head’s Norman Taurog, Palm Springs Weekend packs itself with so many people and so many storylines, it fails to give accurate time to let any of them play out to a point we recognize as “plot.” And that’s okay, because it’s a helluva good time. When your big set piece is Biff accidentally spilling a bottle of detergent into the hotel pool (fulfilling the promise of “suds”), your movie isn’t aiming any higher than the funny bone. In that aspect, the Technicolor fantasy succeeds in matching the genial Beach Party — and we do mean “genial,” not “genital,” as Connie copies Annette by being wound Timex-tight.
But wait — there’s more! Among the mugging, pratfalling fray are an uncredited Linda Gray, Dawn Wells, Bugs Bunny and future Tarzan Mike Henry; a pre-Lost in Space Billy Mumy as a 9-year-old from hell; the great character actor Jack Weston (Fuzz) as the team’s coach; a casino-gigging Modern Folk Quartet singing its big hit (?) about an ox driver; and a bespectacled young man (Mark Dempsey, Valley of the Dragons) who hiccups every time he thinks about sex. If any character does the deed over the Weekend, it’s not apparent. However, with a smile and a wink, Bunny’s cop father (Andrew Duggan, In Like Flint) does insulate he was quite the date rapist in his day. —Rod Lott
I saw more flicks on cable in the ’80s than anywhere else, especially on HBO. One of those movies happened to be The Heavenly Kid, a twice-a-day film, typically catching it both in the late morning and early evening. I was that way with a lot of movies, mind you, but this one was, for the most part, different.
Sure, it had the sex and drugs and all that, but it also had an early-’60s juvenile delinquent named Bobby (Lewis Smith) who, after a dragstrip race gone bad, comes back to earth to help a kid named Lenny (Jason Gedrick) become a world-class chick-scorer; he’s doing this all in the name of getting to “Uptown,” by the way.
But while Lenny is becoming the teen king — or, at least, the teen prince — of cool, Bobby learns that not only is Lenny his son, but Bobby has to grow up and, figuratively, become a man so his son will live to fight another day. When I was a kid myself, I thought that that was a neat little riff, but all grown up now, I can kind of see what director and writer Cary Medoway was trying to say.
I mean, sure, it was in a teen sex comedy, but there’s a lesson about maturity somewhere in there, I promise.
At the time of release, right after he appeared in the anachronistic sci-fi flick Buckaroo Banzai, Smith was poised to be a big name, only to star in the TV-movie version of David Bowie’s The Man Who Fell to Earth before fading into semi-obscurity. It’s kind of a shame, really, because he could’ve been a big star. At least I think so.
Instead, Gedrick, Jane Kaczmarek, Richard Mulligan and future starlet Nancy Valen — whom you may remember in infomercials for the Thigh Roller, Thin ’n Sexy Body Wrap and Kevin Trudeau’s Debt Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About — seemed to have any career. But, in the ’80s, this heavenly kid thought Smith was as cool as cool got, with this movie being an absolute revelation. —Louis Fowler
With its title based on the popular ’70s catchphrase, you’d think a flick called Kiss My Grits would be a cornpone comedy about a hash-slinging waitress who goes on the sexy run from a corrupt Texas County ranger, with plenty of car chases, car wrecks and car-fornication in a scant 80-minute runtime.
In reality, however, it’s a wholly unlikable drama — it claims comedy, but I don’t believe it — about redneck parolee Dolin (Bruce Davison … what?), a love-’em-and-leave-’em sheep wrangler about to be sent back to Huntsville Penitentiary for three years, presumably for the film’s opening watermelon heist; it’s all a bit unclear.
When he meets gangster moll Baby (Susan George with an over-the-top Texas drawl), they plan to rob her good ol’ boy mafia lover Karkas (Anthony Franciosa, taking a paycheck), whose repulsive, Elvis-coiffed chauffeur calls dogs “faggots.” They drug Karkas, steal his dough and Dolin’s brother, Flash (Bruno Kirby … what?), takes down the sheriff.
Dolin also has a precocious son named Boots (Andre Gower, The Monster Squad) who has a robot best friend named Iron Man, but trust me, he’s not Iron Man. It’s some toy from a bootleg Toys ’R Us that cost $82.50. The price is said numerous times.
Barely directed by Jack Starrett, to be fair, as I said before, this film is labeled as a comedy, but instead of leaving me laughing, I’m left reasonably depressed. I kind of expected more rural action from the director of Race with the Devil and Final Chapter: Walking Tall, but instead got this.
Oh, well, I guess it’s a good way to kill an hour and 41 minutes if you’ve got the time. I really don’t. —Louis Fowler
In 1971, Indigenous people cheered as the half-Native superhero Billy Jack womped whitey across the face with his bare foot. But, sadly, it was over a decade until we were given another group of cinematic heroes, this time in the form of the horny teens of Porky’s II: The Next Day.
That’s right: Porky’s II: The Next Day.
Whereas the original is a veritable cum-storm of sex jokes, sex pranks and sex gags, writer and director Bob Clark decided that, the next day, these turned-on teens should get educated on the non-erect real world by introducing religious hypocrisy, political lies and racial discrimination to their lustful lives. And, like morning wood, it actually works.
After a long night of destruction and demolition to Porky’s swamp-water roadhouse, the lovable louts return to Angel Beach High School to — what else? — join the drama club’s production of various Shakespearian works. This garners the attention of a fire-and-brimstone preacher who considers the Bard a sinful sonuvabitch.
Soon enough, the Ku Klux Klan gets their pointy hats involved when they find out that, in a recreation of Romeo and Juliet’s famed balcony scene, the movement’s Montague will be played by John Henry (Joseph Runningfox), a full-blooded Seminole. One night, these white supremacists beat him bad, as well as fire up a cross to add insult to injury.
While they’re dealing with the religious zealots — oh, yeah, and a scheming politico who attempts to make it with a 16-year-old girl — the lascivious lot manage to capture the Klan and, with the help of the entire Seminole tribe, strip the xenophobes and shave their heads before parading them nude in front of the preacher’s anti-Shakespeare rally in front of the school.
What’s so remarkable about all this is how respectful the Seminole people are depicted onscreen in a lesser-known sequel to a notorious sex comedy, more realistically than possibly any social-justice film of the era. While the strip-and-shave scenario is, of course, thought up by the young masturbators, the way the Indigenous community stands behind Henry is remarkable, as well as the fact Clark cast real Natives for the numerous background roles.
But if you’re a racist and like dated wanking material, don’t worry; this sex-filled sequel is still packed with pervy pranks like a hot-to-trot graveyard girl, a snake directed straight toward Ms. Balbricker’s vagina and a randy sexpot who inexplicably vomits from her bouncy boobs in a fancy nightclub. —Louis Fowler
They just don’t make ’em like they used to. No, really, they just don’t make ’em like they used to — probably because they wouldn’t be allowed.
Case in point: Metta Meta Gakido Koza, alternately translated as The Rascal’s Messy Messy Road or Go as Messy as Messy Can Be. Whichever title comes affixed, the Japanese comedy is based on a popular manga by the prolific Yasuji Tanioka. It’s about Gakio Oryama, a pubescent boy taunted for his small penis and obsessed with sucking women’s breasts — against their will, if that’s what it takes. He’s a perverted Dennis the Menace who’s traded overalls for short pants.
Metta Meta is less a story than a collection of scenes in Gakio’s crazy, mixed-up, tits-a-poppin’ life. His mother (Rika Fujie, Outlaw: Black Dagger), gorgeous but sexually deprived, makes do with an inflatable doll with detachable johnson. His dad (Shinsuke Minami, Zatoichi and the One-Armed Swordsman) is henpecked to infidelity and ineffectuality. His bonneted baby sister (Attack Ichiro) has quite the mouth on her (example: “You stupid bitch.”). His grandmother (Toyoko Takechi, Dragon Princess) seems pretty cool, though, having a Charles Bronson poster on her bedroom wall.
Despondent over his tiny unit, Gakio tries — and fails — to commit suicide by drowning, by hanging and by being run over by a train. At school, Gakio asks his teacher (Bullet Train’s Keiko Aikawa), rhetorically, “Have you completely lost your fear, cow?” before instigating a classroom furniture fight.
At the neighborhood bar, Gakio drinks his dad under the table. Impressed, a barfly tells the boy he’s free to do whatever he wants to her, so right then and there, he scoops a boob out of her dress and goes to town on it, accidentally deflating it. No longer impressed, the barfly and her posse beat Gakio to a pulp. Dad joins the fun by running him over with a steamroller, prompting Gakio to scream, “You are a dumb pork head!” When Dad and the barflies try to bury him a barrel of cement, Gakio slices off the ladies’ dresses: “Being a little devil is great!”
The drinking continues at home, where Gakio orders Mom to bring him beer after beer. He even gets the smart kid across the street to imbibe, turning the classmate into a full-blown alcoholic. Back at school, after a lesson on pollination, Gakio and his fellow students pin the teacher to the ground and presumably gang-rape her. Outside the school, he sexually assaults the crossing guard, then asks her out. The boys in his class pick up street hookers and take them to the public showers.
Paying a visit to Dad’s salaryman office, Gakio lifts the skirts of every woman in sight. Before long, the boss (Toshiaki Minami, 1970’s The Assassin) has his lady employees in a topless lineup; Gakio goes home with the boss’ busty secretary (singer Tomomi Sawa) after trying to unbutton her blouse on-site. In Metta Meta‘s climax, Gakio faces and fights the yakuza. Then he goes home and tells his mother, “Mom, I really love your tits!” To prove it, he yanks one out and latches on; in response, her eyes cross to suggest she’s kinda into it — at least until he deflates it, too, and pulls it back with his teeth like a piece of taffy. On the roof, the man in the bug suit cheers.
Oh, did I forget to mention that earlier? Sorry. There’s a man in a bug suit on the roof, played by Jō Shishido (Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill). As far as I can tell, he serves as the film’s ersatz rooster, announcing when it’s morning and afternoon and the like. That he is the least weird element of Metta Meta Gakido Koza should tell you something, except it tells you everything. This is, after all, a nonstop buffet of sexual assault, slapstick violence, cartoon physics, exaggerated popeyed faces, sped-up motion and — in the film’s lone sign of restraint — only one baby hurled down a bowling lane.
Director Mio Ezaki (1970’s Dangerous Games) shows no blood when characters take an ax to the head, instead saving all that red stuff to gush out Gakio’s nose when he’s sexually excited — an anime trope started by Tanioka. More often, Gakio’s erections are suggested by his front teeth growing into giant piano keys — a sight gag uncomfortably bringing to mind the buck-toothed Asian stereotype. Whether that was intended is a mystery to me, but an accurate translation of bringing the crude images (in more ways than one) of the source material to colorful life. Even with all its questionable material, the movie somehow pulls off an all-in-fun innocence I’m willing to buy, likely because it’s five decades old. A marked difference exists between “I can’t believe what I’m seeing and I’m offended!” and “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!” Because I’ve never seen anything quite like it, Metta Meta Gakido Koza belongs to the latter. —Rod Lott
Hoping to follow AIP’s Beach Party to a box-office bonanza, Warner Bros. made its own film following that hit’s formula with one glaring exception: setting it nowhere near a beach. In fact, Palm Springs Weekend posits that each Easter weekend, horny college students from Los Angeles would rather flock to the California desert county for “sex, sand and suds.” Technically speaking, viewers get one out of the three. 
