Once a producer of fine repute who reached his taste apex with Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil in 1958, Albert Zugsmith evidently ditched prestige when he decided what he really wanted to do was direct. In 1960 alone, he helmed no fewer than three movies, all of which featured his secret weapon for easy box office: the sweater-shapely Mamie Van Doren.

Two of those films utilized the word “college” in their titles, but only Sex Kittens Go to College gifted Van Doren — the poor man’s Jayne Mansfield, who is the poor man’s Marilyn Monroe — with the lead role. The 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt babe stars as Dr. Mathilda West, the new science-department professor at Collins College. She has photographic memory and a photograph-worthy frame; she boasts an IQ of 298 and a bod of 40-20-32. As one fellow faculty member perfectly puts it upon meeting this buxom-blonde genius, “Thirteen university degrees never looked like this!” But Dr. West does, and proving that brains exist behind the boobs is even tougher when she arrives on campus with considerable baggage: a former stint stripping under the nom de plume of The Tallahassee Tassel Tosser. 

Although shot in black and white, Zugsmith’s Sex Kittens has all the Palmolive-clean ingredients of one of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello’s sandbox romps: rock ’n’ roll singing and dancing, a chimp who types with his feet, a giant robot named Thinko, characters with silly names (Woo Woo Grabowski), cameos from has-beens (Vampira, John Carradine) and plenty of innocent-enough innuendo (“How do you feel about oral examinations, professor?”). But whereas no Beach Party would dare to contain nudity, the unrated version of Sex Kittens offers plenty, with an extended sequence of back-to-back-to-back-to-back stripteases excised for prudish American moviegoers. Its inclusion on Warner Archive’s “extended international version” DVD is a win for film history, but a loss for the movie, which actually posits a feminist message — one that gets bumped and ground out when Zugsmith exploits the very thing his movie otherwise claims to condemn.  

Living in its own curvaceous, carefree world, the flick is more than watchable, even if nearly every joke falls in the way that Van Doren is not: woefully flat.  —Rod Lott

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Guess the future’s not always so bright. In his Sex Galaxy, writer/director/producer Mike Davis imagines an Earth 100 years from now, when overpopulation and drought have resulted in premarital intercourse being outlawed. Up in space, however, those rules don’t reply, which is good news to the U.S. astronauts who land on a planet of hot and horny women.

Sex Galaxy is not porn, despite that title and setup. Bearing a front-to-back redub, it’s a comedy invented from noncomedic sources: educational shorts, big-boob stag loops, cartoons, PSAs and other cinematic ephemera in the public domain — some 40 titles in total. The meat on these bones comes from two extra-crispy pieces of science-fiction schlock, both originally rejiggered from Russian films by the ever-thrifty Roger Corman: 1965’s Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and 1968’s Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, respectively starring former Sherlock Holmes Basil Rathbone and buxom bombshell Mamie Van Doren. In Sex Galaxy’s sole new footage, Van Doren’s clamshell-bikinied character gets a bona fide nude scene using XXX starlet Puma Swede (Seduced by a Cougar 26, Lez Be Friends, Passenger 69, et al.) as a looks-good-enough stand-in.

Again, Sex Galaxy is not porn, despite the use and top(-heavy) billing of Swede, the performer of such adults-only fare as Screw My Husband Please! 6, Deep Anal Drilling 3 and the rather presumptuously titled White Kong Dong 1: MILF Edition. It is, however, heavily juvenile, what with a millions-year-old creature named the Vaginasaurus. But hey, juvenilia can be funny under the right circumstances and delivery; I’m partial to the all-female planet’s politically incorrect pimp robot, who doesn’t like being compared to an ATM: “Okay, I’ll be your ATM — Astronaut motherfucker Torture Machine!”

Four years later, Davis undertook this experiment in junk-culture repurposing to much funnier and all-around better results with President Wolfman. We all have to start somewhere. Luckily for him, Sex Galaxy is nothing to sneeze at. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

To my knowledge, Student Bodies is the only slasher film in which the killer not only wears green rubber dishwashing gloves, but dispatches victims with paper clips and eggplant. It should be noted that Student Bodies is also an outright spoof — and a damn good one — of the subgenre’s biggest hits at the time, including Halloween, Friday the 13th and When a Stranger Calls.

Reportedly directed by Fletch’s Michael Ritchie, but credited to screenwriter Mickey Rose (a frequent Woody Allen collaborator in the earlier, funnier days of Bananas, et al.), the under-the-radar comedy plays fast and loose. Unafraid to be supremely silly, it takes place at a high school where the pupils perish due to an asthmatic heavy breather voiced by producer Jerry Belson (Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again), arguably the biggest name in the go-for-broke cast. Novelty comes in the form of an onscreen body count and arrows calling out such horror clichés as unlocked doors and windows. That’s a gimmick, but Ritchie/Rose hardly rest there, as gags fly at a ZAZ-approved speed, per the Airplane! model.

Like Airplane! just before it, the movie is smart in its stupidity. For example, a man returns home to find a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick in pieces on the kitchen floor; naturally, he picks it up and returns it to the fridge … but only after Scotch-taping the poultry piece back together.

Coming 19 years before, Student Bodies is the Scary Movie of its day. It even outdoes Scary Movie in the laughs department — not too daunting a feat, I know, but all the more impressive considering it had so few targets to parody. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When Amy Schumer walks in Trainwreck, her ponytail draws the eye as it swings back and forth with the impressive reach and precision of a metronome. Turns out, that look stands as a symbol for the film itself: cute on the surface, deeper underneath.

Graduating from comedian to movie star in one fell swoop — thanks in large part to a smart and highly personal script of her own doing — Schumer plays a young New Yorker named Amy, which is to say a near-Xerox version of the drunken slut she inhabits in her acidic, wildly funny (and funnier) stand-up act. Instead of telling jokes, this fictional Amy tells stories, as a writer for a too-hip city magazine run by a crazy woman (Snowpiercer’s Tilda Swinton, glammed up to a point of nonrecognition). Whereas her fellow staffers work on pieces like a guide to workplace masturbation, Amy is assigned to profile Aaron (Saturday Night Live vet Bill Hader), a sports-medicine physician. Among his roster of superstar patients is basketball’s LeBron James, who is better than expected in a supporting role as himself. James is one-upped in the department of scene-stealing by WWE champ John Cena (The Marine), not playing himself, but Amy’s steroidal, sexually confused suitor.

Aaron is as buttoned-up as Amy is fucked-up, so, as romantic comedies demand, these opposites must attract. But Trainwreck is not your average rom-com, as anyone familiar with Schumer’s 50 shades of blue humor (so blue, it’s the warmest color) knows before frame one. Given that and a ratio more “com” than “rom,” the material is a natural for Judd Apatow. Although this marks the first movie he’s directed that he didn’t also write, Trainwreck works as a gender-flipped and experience-flipped variant of his 40-Year-Old Virgin. Schumer’s work bears those Apatow touchstones — awkward sex, pot smoking, riff-o-matic exchanges that wear out their welcome — yet the collaborators still manage to exploit the old Hollywood template (musical number included!) as they imbue it with pain and a vulnerability most leading ladies are not allowed to exhibit, much less possess.

More goes on in Trainwreck than meets the eye — not a ton, but enough to notice a difference; you’ll feel it first in your funny bone, then your heart. You’ll also feel it in your butt, because Apatow needlessly takes his movies to the two-hour mark and blows past it. Unlike 2012’s This Is 40 — and thank God for that! — at least this time he’s spared us from casting his two daughters. This one is Schumer’s turn in the spotlight, and she takes it and she makes it. Now, whether she can do it again … —Rod Lott

At the peak of the DVD market, I hatched a great idea about making a film called Public Domain: The Movie, which would assemble footage from dozens of the copyright-free titles populating every bargain-bin box set into an overdubbed comedy. As with all my grand visions, I never proceeded past the thinking stage. Mike Davis essentially beat me to it anyway, first with 2008’s sci-fi romp Sex Galaxy and then 2012’s President Wolfman.

Using the 1973 B-horror cheapie The Werewolf of Washington as its base — and Lord knows how many other flicks for frames here and there — President Wolfman rejiggers the Dean Stockwell vehicle into a rollicking tale about POTUS John Wolfman (voiced by Marc Evan Jackson, 22 Jump Street) making good on his last name by becoming a real werewolf after acquiring a Native American curse during a hunting trip. This occurs in the midst of Congressional shenanigans involving a Chinese buyout of good ol’ America and all its waving wheat.

This story is thin and messy, as it should be; Davis knows he needs only just enough spit to hold the disparate pieces together. From there, it’s all about firing the jokes quickly and persistently, and that he does with R-rated glee, sticking the landing not with consistency but regularity. Little footage matches from one scene to the next — or even within the same scene — which is not only part of the fun, but part of the point. If the experiment were polished, it would fail.

Instead, President Wolfman is infinitely creative, leaving no stock footage unsqueezed for potential laughter, from a crudely animated Smokey the Bear PSA to a surprisingly graphic educational reel on childbirth. Only a gyrating go-go girl during the opening credits appears to account for original footage … and who’s going to complain about such sights? (Don’t answer that.) —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.