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
When I met Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, it was in the mature section of the video store. Surrounded by beaded curtains, the titillation of promised soft porn — “cable version,” the box exclaimed — just around the fuzzy corner to syrupy heaven and carnal self-pleasure.
Instead, it was a Brazilian art film about the dual nature a woman goes though channeling love and lust. I was thoroughly pissed. But now, some 25 years after I first saw it, I have viewed Dona Flor with new eyes.
After a night of hard partying, Vadinho (José Wilker) dies. His widow, the titular Flor (Sônia Braga), brings new meaning to long-suffering; during their marriage, he went from cockfighting and gambling to countless affairs and wife-beating, as one does.
Flor goes on with her life. She meets and marries Teodoro (Mauro Mendonça), a pharmacist she believes is a good man, but also a boring one. It’s okay, though; Vadinho’s ghostly visage is fine with performing all his late-husbandly duties — all sexual, of course. I guess Teodoro does, too.
While I originally thought this was tale about a new wife and the trials and titrations about marriage, it’s actually a sexy wish-fulfillment fantasy, with Braga’s Flor being the sultry object of South American desire. It’s concerning that she puts up with Vadinho’s abuse, but I guess she makes peace with it, because Flor gives both men a kiss goodnight, even if one’s a ghost.
Dona Flor was first remade in 1983 as Kiss Me Goodbye with Sally Field, James Caan and Jeff Bridges. The original’s sex appeal was monstrously gone, replaced with a brown swatch of neutered khaki fabric. —Louis Fowler
After a hiatus in Vegas, glamour model Emanuelle (Nicole D’Angelo, Darling Nikki) returns to town and into the abusive arms of her controlling ex (Chris Spinelli, who also produced). She makes her intentions clear: “I just want to be beautiful again.”
He makes his clear, too: “Street trash,” he chides her, then adds, “You can stay here and we can dream better” — whatever that means. As with the case of every Gregory Hatanaka film I’ve seen, “whatever that means” remains unclear, ostensibly up to the viewer. But we do know she stabs him with scissors … or do we?
With D’Angelo co-directing alongside Hatanaka (Samurai Cop 2: Deadly Vengeance), the hourlong The Awakening of Emanuelle then settles into a thrice-repeated pattern: She meets a photographer. The photographer shoots her in hot lingerie. She beds the photographer. Next!
No doubt Famous T and A proved an enormous VHS hit for Charles Band back in 1982. Hell, it probably paid for an L.A. divorce or a Romanian castle. Now, a full four decades later, the exploitation film legendfinally gives it something his 2006 movie Evil Bong already has seven of: a sequel.
What in the holy name of Craig Hosoda took you so long, Chuck?
Whereas sex bomb Sybil Danning hosted the original, Famous T and A 2 comes fronted by a sex doll in human form, Diana Prince. A former (?) porn star, she’s best known as the sidekick to drive-in movie critic Joe Bob Briggs on his current Shudder series, a gig that doesn’t ask for much. This compilation flick calls for even less: Sit still, face the camera, read innuendo-leaning lines off cue cards, raise an eyebrow now and again. (The latter accounts for more movement than Band’s camera.)
After a quickie quick run-through of early skin-on-the-screen history — or herstory, really — Prince officially kicks off Band’s “tit-illating trip” with a tribute to Russ Meyer. Strangely, it’s done so with clips from Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, one of the few Meyer mamm-sterpieces with no nudity. That oddity immediately rectifies itself with segments honoring Jess Franco, Andy Sidaris, Linnea Quigley and the like. As one could guess, the bulk of T&A 2 pulls from Band’s Full Moon-owned archives, from the respectable (Tourist Trap, also skin-free) to the reprehensible (Unlucky Charms) to the Skinemax staples.
In these cases and most others, the clips aren’t clipped enough. For example, as a one-time 13-year-old, I’m pretty sure viewers want to see Sherilyn Fenn making the two-backed beast with an actual beast in Meridian, not several minutes of talk leading up to it. The erotica from Band’s Surrender Cinema titles wear out their welcome sooner, in particular the tentacles-a-poppin’ Femalien: Cosmic Crush.
Among the other Surrender snippets are Veronica 2030 and Bad Girls at Play, both notable per Prince for their featured porn personalities. The former puts Julia Ann in some kind of gold tinfoil (but not for long) as some kind of sex robot; the latter finds Trump belt notch Stormy Daniels unleashing breasts with angles so boxy, they don’t appear to be finished.
Something about it all seems … off. Perhaps it’s a lack of energy; perhaps it’s my age; or perhaps the concept’s irrelevance in an everything-on-demand world. Or perhaps it’s all these things, and Famous T and A 2 is really as boring as it struck me. Co-directed and written by Full Moon regular Brooks Davis (The Gingerweed Man), it stretches the definition of “famous” as far as Band does with dollars. —Rod Lott
Words you never wanted to see grouped in such an order, “directed by Corey Feldman,” adorn Busted, the thankfully lone such endeavor from the former Goonie. It aims — repeat: aims — to be a Naked Gun-style parody of cop movies, but comes off as being made by people who have never seen a comedy and know the genre only through eavesdropping. Perhaps Feldman himself sensed this, which explains Busted‘s double-barreled categorization as a spoof and a Skinemax entry. Jokes and boobs: Only one requires skill — well, post-scalpel.
Not content with calling the shots, Feldman also stars as a zany cop in a precinct of nothing but. Even zanier, to bring crime off the streets, his crew brings it into the station; pantyhose-faced purse snatchers roam the halls freely, while one jail cell is transformed into a bordello. The strategy is not unlike the “Hamsterdam” season of TV’s brilliant The Wire, and let that be the only time the two shall be tied. (Let this serve as my proactive public apology to David Simon.)
Story stops at setup: With a Peeping Tom on the loose — not to mention bank robbers and a bikini-clad woman crossing streets while holding a giant letter “J” (ugh) — the mayor (Rance Howard, Ticks) assigns a stern lady captain (Mariana Morgan, Exit to Eden) to keep the cops under control or else. Her hair bun is wound so tightly, you just know it’s going to be unfurled toward the end, revealing her as Total Hottie. (However, Feldman does not telegraph he then will violently remove all fabric in order to expose her breasts.)
With a reason to exist out of the way, it’s one unfunny joke after another, each increasing in flatness. They’re so poorly written, you can predict the punchline immediately upon hearing idioms like “show her the ropes” and “by the book.” To be fair, such gags come straight from the Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker style, but it really is all in the delivery. For example, a police sketch of a stick figure can be funny under the proper circumstances, like as a quick cutaway; you don’t pass it around to every other character in a crowded shot to individually display and comment upon further. Your movie may be dirt-stupid, but viewers are not. (Okay, most viewers.)
In an extended boxing match, Feldman referees; for some reason, that requires him to pop one eye, turn his mouth diagonal and talk out one side of it, in an accent approximating … I dunno, Burgess Meredith? He does this not just for a line, which might be acceptable, but the entire scene. It’s painful viewing — more painful than a looped, slow-motion clip of Gage getting an up-close look at a semi in 1989’s Pet Sematary.
Another set piece finds Feldman wrestling a live gun from porn star Ron Jeremy. Who knows, that could be based on something the two did at a party in the Valley, and Feldman thought it’d be a hoot to throw in. If so, that’s more effort than he expended on masking the rag covering his genitals in a shower threesome (none) or where the top of the precinct’s set ends (also none).
Among other cameos, Julie Strain is on hand long enough to drop her towel; Todd Bridges, to remind you he’s still alive; and Elliott Gould, to embarrass his family and threaten his legacy. Corey Haim is also present, but only for a few random scenes. That’s because he reportedly walked upon learning his “friend” Feldman also had hired Haim’s alleged molester, Dominick Brascia (Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning).
Inadvertent or not, the one thing Busted does right is giving 1990s T&A royalty Monique Parent, Ava Fabian and Griffin Drew the rare opportunity to flex muscles beyond just the ones required to unhook their bras. They get to flex comedic muscles, too, even if that means fellating butter-rubbed corn on the cob. —Rod Lott
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.
