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

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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.