A prophetic film about smut on TV.
Sidney Lumet’s 1976 film Network is a masterpiece. The Paddy Chayefsky-scripted film was a brutal satire about the direction that television was heading in the 1970s, but although it won several major Oscars, it was not universally admired by critics at the time with some complaining that it was crude and marred by overstatement. Today Network looks like a documentary. There have been many other more extreme television satires in the years since, and Network wasn’t actually the first to tackle the medium. The best precursor to it is The Year Of The Sex Olympics, Nigel Kneale’s eerily prophetic 1968 TV play, a sci-fi drama every bit as savage as Chayefsky’s vision and one that anticipates the popularity of the reality TV phenomena by decades. Between these two classics, there was a little-regarded sexploitation film called Video Vixens!, and in its own way, it was just as prescient.
Clifford Bradley (Norman Fields) is the head of the TV network WKLITT (it ain’t subtle) and is a man obsessed with the belief that there is a conspiracy afoot in America to de-sexualise the entire populace. He is also incensed by the network’s film critic Gordon Gordon (Philip Luther, billed as Harrison Phillips) and his perpetual outrage at the smut he is forced to sit through in the new American films he has to review. He decides to stage a fightback and broadcast an awards show for pornographic films. In order to do this, he hires adult film-maker Rex Boorski (George ‘Buck’ Flower) to stage the show and decides to force the prudish film critic to anchor the event alongside Boorski’s buxom girlfriend Inga (Robyn Hilton from Blazing Saddles).
The award show itself forms the bulk of the movie, featuring extended clips from the winning films with titles like Wailing Whiplash, A Saga Of Milk, Stagnet and The Shrink Who Loved Me. These are all in black & white and though softcore, they do push the limits of what you might expect in a film from the era, often resembling the roughie films of the late sixties but with both male and female full frontal nudity. These are interspersed with crudely sexual adverts for a variety of outrageous products: a vaginal deodorant called Twinkle Twat, easy-to-use vaginal wigs called the Minute Merkin, the Kentucky Dildo (the advert involves a parody of the bone throwing from 2001: A Space Odyssey), a unique cure for haemorrhoids called Rhoid Away (it involves a large hammer) and an advert for a perfume called Passion involving a live experiment with a convicted rapist, the offensiveness of which prompts the presenter to take a righteous stand against what he’s been forced to promote.
To emphasise the theme, the cast is full of actors familiar from sexploitation and hardcore movies of the era*. Norman Fields appeared in The Dirty Mind of Young Sally alongside George ‘Buck’ Flower. Flower started out in sexploitation films like Below the Belt & Country Cuzzins before appearing in the weirdly nightmarish hardcore comedy Sex In The Comics. The actress having her pubic hair permed is played by Sandy Dempsey, star of Little Miss Innocence which also starred Terri Johnson, the girl in the Minute Merkin advert, and both Dempsey & Johnson appeared in Drop Out Wife with Angela Carnon who plays Gordon Gordon’s wife. Linda York, the girl in the ‘Dial-A-Snatch’ advert was in The Love Garden, a surprisingly progressive and unfairly obscure early hardcore feature, and Maria Arnold who plays the second rape victim starred in Country Hookers, another film featuring Sandy Dempsey.
The performer most fans of seventies exploitation cinema will notice is the ‘Twinkle Twat’ girl played by cult actress Cheryl ‘Rainbeaux’ Smith from Caged Heat, The Swinging Cheerleaders and many other favourites, but there are several other familiar names hidden among the credits. The production assistant (and slate man in the film itself) was Rick Rosenthal who would go on to direct Halloween II in 1981 and Bad Boys with Sean Penn; the script continuity was done by Sandra Peabody, star of The Last House On The Left; and the assistant editor was Steve Miner, future director of the first two Friday The 13th sequels and also an uncredited actor on The Last House On The Left.
Ultimately the success of Bradley’s stag awards show exposes everybody’s hypocrisy. The morally upstanding chairman of the board (Truck Stop Women‘s Herb Graham) swoons over the massive ratings and the self-righteous Gordon Gordon is willing to sell out his principles in light of the show’s success. But there is a point being made amidst all this smut.
It’s pretty clear that Clifford Bradley and his obsession about Americans having their sexual vitality sapped is inspired by Sterling Hayden’s lunatic General Jack D. Ripper from Stanley Kubrick’s classic Dr Strangelove or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, except in Video Vixens! Bradley may have a point. The film was directed by Ronald Sullivan who started out making softcore exploitation films such as Lust Weekend, The Bizarre Ones & The Erotic Circus, but in the late seventies would find success as a director of hardcore adult movies with The Budding Of Brie, October Silk & Outlaw Ladies, all made under the pseudonym Henri Pachard. Sullivan made Video Vixens! in 1973 in the wake of Judge Joel J. Tyler’s obscenity ruling against Deep Throat in March 1973. It’s also worth noting that João Fernandes, the assistant cameraman on Video Vixens! photographed both Deep Throat & Devil In Miss Jones under the pseudonym Henry Flecks, so Sullivan would have had a direct connection to the legal situation.
Deep Throat, along with Gerard Damiano’s other adult classic Devil In Miss Jones, was responsible for ushering in the ‘porno chic’ trend and the court ruling was the first move in a right-wing, often religiously fuelled moral backlash at the perceived popularisation of pornography in the US. Video Vixens! ends with Bradley’s character describing the stag awards show as just the opening shot in an ongoing war against those seeking to suppress the desires of American citizens, anticipating that a retaliatory pushback against the network’s smutty hit is inevitable. In the fifty years since it came out, there have been numerous campaigns against pornography in the US – including the Republican-organised Meese Commission in the 1980s and those fuelled by the rise of the fundamentalist Christian right in the 2000s. But running in parallel with this, porn is somehow a billion-dollar industry, the Fifty Shades Of Grey books are international best sellers, read by millions seemingly unwilling to admit they are just reading socially proofed pornography and prurient celebrity nudes are leered at by a hypocritical tabloid readership.
Ronald Sullivan’s crude little film anticipated all of this. It isn’t Network, let me make that clear, but its ambition should be noted. It’s also funny and, at times, gloriously offensive, and you can see the whole film online for free right now. Well, that is unless Mr Bradley’s enemies get their way.
* Ken Shapiro’s 1974 The Groove Tube, another much less impressive TV spoof comprised of a series of sketches also featured adult actresses among its cast: Mary Mendum (often credited as Rebecca Brooke) and Jennifer Welles who had appeared together in two of Joeseph Sarno’s best films of the era, Confessions of a Young American Housewife & Abigail Lesley is Back In Town.
DANIEL STILLINGS
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My libido’s now like a fly trapped behind a window pane: in terminal decline, but still persistent enough to be relentlessly annoying. The above film sounds entertaining, but from description sounds rather like ahastily assembled framing device for a collection of sexy skits! I’ll have a gander and find out!! Wow-ee!!! I can relate somewhat more to rainbeaux Smith’s appearance in The Incredible Melting Man, i.e. someone with terrible skin acting the voyeur from shrubbery (fisherman decapitation not yet encountered).. The dichotomy of repression and celebration is of course as fundamental to humanity as night and day (and attendant shades of grey). I think that the church is actually a scam designed to promote fucking by making it seem more exciting. That’s why they are down on porno, it’s competition. There’s no mystical element to porno I know of, though I am not as well versed as some, and the philosophy is all on one level. I’m thinking of sex-denial and death-denial as components in religious corporations – in both cases, merely putting thee ineviatable at a comfortable remove – but these concepts migrate out of religion into other modes of social herding – if one denies death, if one is immortal as in consumerism, there’s no need for children, no need to procreate etc. etc. One’s genetic bag is offered to the great housing estate and supermarket set up – superhero types looking perplexed in ruined landscapes and so forth. If the purpose of life is survival, the purpose of survival is continuation, continuation should involve making improvements where necessary, hence evolution of a kind is essential – or something … WE ALL must become Werewolves-by-night. Contradiction is at our core. We have to out of necessity wind our necks in in order to negotiate the hell of each other, to our mutual benefit, but that’s boring, hence deceit, dishonesty, and secrets exist out of necessity as an escape valve (… etc)