Barbarella (1968)

Barbarella
Director: Roger Vadim
France/Italy 1968
98 min
Starring: Jane Fonda, John Phillip Law, Anita Pallenberg, Milo O'Shea, David Hemmings and Marcel Marceau.

Dildano: [radioing instructions to the rebel army] And our password will be... Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. 

Barbarella: You mean the secret password is Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch? 

Dildano: Exactly. 

The password is, by the way, the name of a real village and community in Wales. For its Wikipedia page and some help with the pronunciation, I will gladly provide you with a link.

As much as I adore this film, I almost have to love the tagline more. "Who can save the universe?" Well, it sure as hell isn't Barbarella! She knows how to dress and wear her hair, but she seems to have a hard time not getting distracted by attractive (and also not-very-attractive) men.

Barbarella's (Jane Fonda) initial goal is to find and stop the evil mastermind Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea, and yes - the group Duran Duran got their name from this character), who threatens to interrupt centuries of intergalactic peace with a weapon of mass destruction. (Cold War vibes, anyone?) And the rest of the film is an orgy of cool 1960's music, short skirts (if any), fabulous boots, sarcastic comments and... well, orgies. Although by 1968 filmmakers still had the decency to skip the porn, and instead only indicate all action worthy of Markis de Sade. (At least in the United States - Swedish films made at the same time is another topic indeed.)
The lovely thing with the "promiscuity" is that this sexually active Barbarella actually is saved in the end "by her innocence"! Oh, I should have lived in the 1960's.

I have the feeling that some people may believe that this film objectifies women. And yes, it does. But it objectifies men equally - me and a film classmate drooled immeasurable amounts over the blind angel Pygar (John Phillip Law), and somewhat shamefully over the resistance character suitably named Dildano (David Hemmings). And if pantomime genius Marcel Marceau accepted a part in this movie, one has to be able not to take it too seriously!

The film constantly underlines that it thinks itself ridiculous, most notably by sarcastic one-liners by Barbarella. A couple of examples:
Barbarella is captured in a plastic cage and attacked by a giant flock of birds. After having wined a bit about it, she calmly states that "this is a much too poetic way to die".
Walking in the castle of SoGo (a town named after the biblical Sodom and Gomorra), Barbarella and Pygar hear a scream. She first exclaims, as one would, "What's that screaming?", then follows it up with "A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming..."

Male objectification.
Above: Pygar. Below: Dildano.

What more can I say? I love this film. It's funny, it's over-the-top, it's campy. It is obviously, and rightfully, listed among the "Top 100 Most Amusingly Bad Movies Ever Made" in The Official Razzie Movie Guide. I want that book. The only thing that seemed missing was the indicated, but never fulfilled, female pleasure activities between Barbarella and The Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg).

Now to an expose over some of the outfits Jane Fonda manages to switch between during the most weird moments in the film:

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975)

Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS

Director: Don Edmonds

USA/Germany 1975

96 min

What to expect? What to expect.

Me and my boyfriend popped this into the DVD player yesterday evening, and of course had no expectations what-so-ever (besides hopefully some entertainment). You will probably, like us, need 2 litres of Coca-Cola and a chocolate bar each to get through this.

It's quite easy to explain the plot, so I'll begin with that:

Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne) is the female head of the SS at an experimantation camp in Germany. She gets a kick out of experimenting (i.e. cutting limbs off, boiling people alive, sterilizing them with gruesome methods I will not describe for you, etc.) with both male and female prisoners. Sometimes she sleeps with the male prisoners, but most often that ends with them on an operating table and getting their family treasures cut off. We will also see prisoners infected with diseases, like syphilis, and a lesbian warden raping a female prisoner, accompanied by hairy and drunken SS-men. And a lot of naked bodies.

The surprising thing about this film, which you expect to be really bad and tasteless (and it is, mostly), is that after about half through the picture it actually gets really good. That's when the prisoners gather and figure out a way to escape. With the help of a well-hung German/American man (who thanks to his technique in the sack hasn't had to cut his male limb off, in order to please the sexually frustrated Ilsa), they go berserk and kill guards, in an action scene worthy a normal action movie. This part is actually really good. Especially when Ilsa gets her punishment - that's pretty lovely.

With the present day audience's eyes, this film does not contain as much gore and erotica as one might expect - but it certainly helped pushing the gore trend in movies, not to mention the exploitation genre.

(Note: The cut version of this film is R-rated in the USA, the uncut X-rated. Here in Sweden, everyone from the age of 15 is allowed to watch it.)

A little history lesson?

The interesting thing about Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS is that it states to be based on real life events - we even get a little text screen, informing us of the realism of this film, before the movie begins.

And it's true to some extent - the Ilsa character is obviously based on the real Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps commendant Ilse Koch (1906-1967).

Hard to tell them apart, huh?

Ilse Koch, AKA The Beast of Buchenwald, worked at the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937 (a camp for Jews, Poles, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, prisoners of war etc.). She didn't waste any time, and as soon as she was installed there properly, she started torturing the prisoners - a favorite method of hers being to force the prisoners to rape each other in front of an audience. She got half-hearted orders to be a little more human to them.

In 1943, Ilse and her husband Karl Koch were arrested for embezzlement and for murdering prisoners. She was imprisoned until 1945, when her husband got the death penalty and she was set free by the German authorities. Soon, however, the USA stepped in and arrested her again.

At the trial evidence like cut-off tattooes of prisoners and a shrunken human head was revealed. She was sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. September 1, 1967, she was found in her cell, having committed suicide by hanging herself.

Below: First a picture of the evidence - tattooes cut off from prisoners. Film clip: a silent film clip from Ilse Koch's trial, where the evidence is shown.

Our heroine Dyanne Thorne went on making sequels to this film (even though Ilsa got her brain blown in bits by the end of it) - Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks (1976), Ilsa, the Tigress of Siberia (1977) and Greta, the Mad Butcher (1977).

And don't you forget Dyanne's earlier successes with characters like The Fairy Godmother in The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio (1971) and "Hooker" in Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman (1975).

Some people are just born to make history.

Posters:

Wow, look at how they marketed this movie back in the 1970's! Different posters for each day - "Teaser No. 1 - 4 days prior to opening". Brilliant.

Double Agent 73 (1974)

Double Agent 73
Director: Doris Wishman
USA 1974
73 min


No, I'm not going to tell you anything about this film until you've seen the intertitles:

Juri Productions? Sounds like quality!

And the title of the film. Could have been a James Bond movie.

Chesty Morgan? I bet that's her real name. Why didn't my mother name me that?

Well now. Got your own picture of what the film is going to be? Otherwise, I can tell you.

Let me begin with the fact that this is a reeeeally bad movie. I mean, REALLY bad. But let me give you a tip: buy a bottle of wine, some crackers and cheese, and watch this wonderfully entertaining cult film with your best friends. It is hilarious.

So, the plot:
Double Agent 73, who's real world name is Jane (played by polish "actress" Chesty Morgan) receives a call from her boss during her vacation, telling her he as a really important assignment for her, and she is the only right person for it. She is going to find and kill... an evil man. Isn't too important. But he sells low-grade heroin on the market. And that is not good.
The important thing however is that Jane has gigantic breasts (and I mean gigantic, see following pictures) and that she has a camera surgically installed in her left breast (!). In other words - she is perfectly equipped for the assignment!
The last thing you need to know about the plot is - Jane has a habit of making herself comfortable every time she gets alone, meaning that she takes off the clothes on her upper body. But don't all women do that, anyway?

Now - look at all these glorious screenshots. They tell everything you need to know.

Look at that beautiful woman! Love her shoes. (?)

"What? You want me to work on my bare-chested vacation?"

Professionally dressed agent Jane is informed about the assignment.

Making herself comfortable while finding important documents.

A woman is killed in the shower. Hitchcock must feel embarrassed by his shower scene in Psycho (1960).

Brilliant! She kills a man by forcing ice cubes into his mouth until he suffocates. Why didn't I come up with that one?

And this is how Jane takes photographs with her boobies.

Yes. She kills a man by rubbing poison on her breast and seduces him to lick them. Watch this movie with your kids! Or even better - with someone else's kids!

Can it get more 1970's?

"Oh no! He caught me! And my breasts are trying to escape!"

The evil man is... evil. Grrr.

And the film ends. But the last frame can't just be of a boring airplane, so we put a couple of boobs there to.

Isn't it amazing that a woman has directed this? People have tried to explain Doris Wishman as a feminist, being a sole woman in a man dominated industry. But no. All women in her films are mostly blonde and stupid. I intend to watch all Wishman's films. For the heck of it.

As for Chesty Morgan, her career was a short one. She made another movie with Wishman, Deadly Weapons from 1974 (I wonder what those "deadly weapons" were...?), but then she got fired because she never came to the set on time. It was also a bit of a kerfuffle to re-dub all her lines because of her Polish accent.
Chesty Morgan made an appearance in Federico Fellini's Casanova (1976), but her scenes were cut. The last film she made was in Hong Kong called Third Hand (1981). Just check out the info on that one on IMDb - nada. Her performance isn't even confirmed.
What a tragic loss of a great actress.

Quotes:

Chesty: Flowers are pretty, aren't they?

Let Me Die a Woman (1978)

Let Me Die a Woman
Director: Doris Wishman
USA 1978
79 min

Let Me Die a Woman is a dramatized pseudo-documentary made by cult soft porn director Doris Wishman (1912-2002) in 1972. The subject is transsexuals, both male and female, who want to make / have done a sex change operation. The film wasn't released until 1978.

The films mixes educational scenes with dramatizations of real events with soft porn. All through the film Dr. Leo Wollman, a sex change specalist, guides us through transsexual group meetings, interviews and even a sex change operation.
The film was rejected by UK cinema, and wasn't released there until 1982, more than 10 minutes shorter.

Let Me Die a Woman is really interesting, amusing and bizarre. Of course you have to realize that it isn't a documentary in the true meaning of the word. The transsexuals and the operations are real, but they obviously had a script to read from. It would be sad otherwise, if they always sounded like bad actors when speaking. I will return to the fascinating woman Doris Wishman in later posts, the woman who often is called "the female Ed Wood".

Most of her films made during the 1960's and 1970's were made for the American sexploitation film market. All self learned she used the camera in an innovative way, experimenting with angles, close-ups and cutting. In that way she had far more talent than earlier mentioned Ed Wood.
She was one of the most prolific female directors through cinema history and was making films until her death. Her last finished film was Satan Was a Lady (2001). On her death bed she said that she would continue making films in hell.

Leslie, a Puerto Rican transsexual, tells us about her difficult childhood and the becoming of a woman.

Dr. Leo Wollman, the narrator and informant.

Dr. Wollman tells us the story about the man who couldn't afford a sex change operation, and in his desperation tried to do it himself. With a hammer and chisel.

A group meeting for pre- and post- operation transsexuals.

A genetical male has developed breasts due to a hormone treatment.

"Not all dildos are used for medical purposes." Dr. Wollman tells us.

Illustrations of the male and the female sex organs.

A not-so-cosy sex change operation scene. But interesting and informative.

A dramatization of a story about a newly operated transsexual who had a hurry using her new vagina.

An example of successful sex after a sex change operation.

Inverted black and white photo.

The End.