Claremont High has a new health teacher: Erika Petersen, straight from Sweden. As played by Julie Ange (in her only other role besides Girl on a Chain Gang), she shakes up the classroom, not only because she’s one juicy Swedish meatball, but because the class is now known as “anatomical biology.” You don’t need an A in spelling to know that means S-E-X!

Although Ms. Petersen is set up to be the main character of the film (and introduced to the students by Fred Willard, in his movie debut!), she isn’t. In fact, she seems to exist in her own plotline, almost entirely separate from the other. After all, Teenage Mother isn’t called Teenage Mother for nothing. Somebody’s gotta get pregnant, right?

Enter Claremore’s cutest student, Arlene (Arlene Farber, I Drink Your Blood) she of the low-cut blouse, leather skirt and big ol’ go-go boots. She’s going steady with the prudish Tony (Howard Le May), but he’s more into stock cars than her stacked curves. Enter — ahem — Duke (Frederick Riccio), the school bad boy. You don’t need an A in math to know that three’s a crowd, and it takes two to tango!

Meanwhile, back at the class, Ms. Petersen’s noble intentions of educating the kids meet an immovable force in the stereotypical crone of a librarian bothered by “vulgar illustrations” in books on the birds and the bees. You don’t need an A in physics or zoology to– okay, I’ll stop. Just know that this moral war boils over with the intensity of a tantric orgasm, leading to planted pornography, attempted rape, a successful runaway and, finally, the scene that got audiences in the theater out of curiosity, only to send them fleeing in horror: the birth of a baby.

Those few minutes constitute the only part of Teenage Mother that notorious producer Jerry Gross (The Dynamite Brothers) didn’t write and direct. Making good on his name, he spliced in medical footage of Dr. Anthony Miseo’s “Universal Obstetric Forceps” in action … as they graphically play claw machine to pull an infant from its mother’s graphically splayed-and-pried vagina. Seeing what is done to it via metal contraption is terrifying, in ways that the goriest horror films are not, because you know those are pretend.

That clinical demonstration aside, Teenage Mother plays pretend in an otherwise sanitized sandbox not dissimilar to more sugar-coated tenpins of the era, where camp value outweighs artistic demerit. With Gross throwing crime into the mix, we get one primo JD flick that, like the aforementioned vagina, is surprisingly tight. —Rod Lott

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I’ve been in lust with notorious superstar Gloria Trevi since I first caught her film debut, Pelo Suelto, on a Spanish-language channel sometime in the mid-’90s. With her brazen sexuality and the willingness to exploit it, what better romantic icon for a lost boy with burgeoning erections and a love of catchy tunes?

What I didn’t know, however, is the hell she was being put through by her manager, Sergio Andrade. A music producer and sexual predator who ran his services like a religious cult, he constantly brought in scantily clad scads of young women to fill his hit-making coffers, as well as his eternal erotic pleasure.

The whole downbeat drama is documented in Gloria, featuring a highly praised performance by Sofía Espinosa as the acclaimed queen of Mexican pop. Starting as a street urchin looking for fame and fortune on the music charts, Trevi quickly comes under the spell of Andrade (Marco Pérez), grooming her into Latin America’s biggest star.

Eventually, it leads to a chaotic life on the run, filled with more perverse twists than a whole season of a telenovela, including dead babies, underage accusations and, ultimately, Brazilian incarceration. Answering many of the dirty rumors about what happened during this time, director Christian Keller does away with both sides of the story, instead telling Gloria’s version of the facts.

Espinosa miraculously becomes Trevi, with her raspy voice, torn shirts and intense demeanor; it’s horrific though to see this Mexican symbol of personal liberation and sexual freedom was actually a talented slave to the very life she sang both about and against. The film does her story absolute justice.

But, in case you’re wondering, she’s doing much better now, still making hits. —Louis Fowler

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Whereas the terrifying British film Threads is a nuclear story about the destruction of England made for adults, the animated British movie When the Wind Blows follows a similar path, but for children, apparently. I guess kids have got to learn about the ravages of bleeding gums and hair loss due to atomic warfare sometime.

Lovely couple Jim and Hilda are retirees who mostly piddle around in their quaint country home, drinking plenty of tea and arguing about which of the four radio stations is best. That serene life is torn asunder when an atomic bomb is dropped in nearby London, leaving them on their own as they struggle with no power, no water and no health care in the aftermath.

For 87 minutes, we are painfully forced to watch this charming elderly pair as they not only physically deteriorate in the worst ways possible due to radiation sickness, but hold out irrefutable hope that the government will come and rescue them any minute from the “Russkies.” They never do.

With a stellar title song by David Bowie and a decent end-credits tune by Roger Waters, this partly live-action film will hit hard for people my age (somewhere in our 40s) as an animated reminder of our own aging parents and how their blind faith in manmade doctrines could ultimately leave them to die alone and scared in a puddle of their own filth. —Louis Fowler

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Frankie Fane loves the limelight. As played by Fantastic Voyage’s Stephen Boyd in a big, barking dog of a performance, Fane — a mere one letter from “fame,” folks! — is the (self-)center of his own universe at the Academy Awards, where he’s up for his first Oscar as Best Actor, against such stiff competition as Burt Lancaster and Richard Burton. How he got to that big night plays out in feature-length flashback in — what else? — The Oscar.

We watch as Frankie goes from two-bit traveling stripper spieler to accidental actor to hot new thing to box-office poison to (gasp!) pining for a TV pilot before a from-nowhere nomination saves his bacon. Along the way, he uses and abuses everyone in his immediate orbit: the talent scout who discovers him (Eleanor Parker, Eye of the Cat), his agent (comedian Milton Berle, playing it straight), his bump-and-grinder of a girlfriend (a super-sexy Jill St. John, Diamonds Are Forever), his eventual wife (Elke Sommer, The Wrecking Crew) and his best friend and manager, Hymie (crooner Tony Bennett, in his one and only film role not playing himself). Forget The Oscar; the marquee should have read The Asshole.

Thanks to the books The Golden Turkey Awards, The Official Razzie Movie Guide, Bad Movies We Love and their ilk, The Oscar has carried the burden as one of Hollywood’s legendary stinkers since its release, which isn’t playing fair. Oh, the melodrama is overwrought, all right, but I suspect its tarnished rep is more a case of Tinseltown not appreciating the suggestion that all is not golden in the moviemaking biz — especially one with such a nut-kick of an ending!

Immensely entertaining, The Oscar effectively killed the upwardly mobile careers of Boyd and director Russell Rouse, who co-wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator Clarence Greene (Academy Award winners themselves for Pillow Talk) and some new kid named Harlan Ellison. What’s a revolutionary sci-fi author like him doing in a star-studded pic like this? While not entirely sure, I wonder if he is to blame for Frankie’s lingo-laden hepcat dialogue — to wit:
• “You fat honey-dripper!”
• “I’m up to here with all this bring-down!”
• “You’ve gotta be shuckin’ me!”

More narcissistic viewers might read this cautionary tale as more of an instruction manual, like Valley of the Dolls. While the two don’t reside on the same level of camp, make no mistake: They fucked. —Rod Lott

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On an alternate timeline in an alternate America, a civil war with questionable sides rages on as everyday people try to survive by ignoring it. As the despot president begins to face his last few hours of life, the ubiquitous television network decides to hold a rather sketchy benefit concert for either the victims of the war or the promoter’s sizable debts, whichever comes first.

To play the show, they spring from prison the troubled troubadour of this timeline, Jack Fate. As he surveys the broken country with a wide array of name-brand actors, dropping abstract mantras and humanistic tantras, things continue to fall apart as Fate and his band perform some death-defying tunes in preparation for the last night of America as they seem to know it.

This remarkably prescient travelogue was conceived by (and starring) Bob Dylan, by the way.

One of the most woefully ignored films of the past 20 years, Masked and Anonymous is the dystopic present presented as a bitter song of broken hearts, hard-edged and mean-spirited in a way that refuses to give answers or, even worse, reasons for anything that it presents on screen and in theory.

And while that is usually something that might irritate most people, here, through Dylan and director Larry Charles’ acidic pen, it all seems like it was just two decades too early. With the threat of wars, pestilence, famine and death riding just over our own horizon, we don’t need to know the hows and whys anymore; we just gotta turn on the TV and figure out a way to survive it.

Dylan as Fate is, ironically, the movie’s Everyman; when he says, “I stopped trying to figure things out long ago,” it’s the only way to make sense of the shit that rolls down from on high, both in the film and in our own damnable lives, guaranteed no tomorrows. —Louis Fowler

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