Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Bonnie's Kids (1973)

A nasty little noir gem from the golden days of the drive-in, Bonnie's Kids follows the genre formula of detailing the machinations of slippery, manipulative operators as they double-cross one another. Almost nobody in this movie is even slightly reputable. It's lots of fun.

We start off in a crappy small town, where the two daughters of Bonnie (long dead- Mom's name's an attempt to cash in on Bonnie and Clyde), are living with their stepdad; Charlie's a mean old man who can hardly stand how his sexy stepdaughter Myra (Robin Mattson) cock teases the boys in their dead-end town. He tries to rape the girl to teach her a lesson, but her sister Elly (Tiffany Bolling) shoots him dead with a shotgun in the unbelievably sleazy first ten minutes of the movie. They then steal his pickup truck and head for El Paso. Briefly, it looks like it will be a tale of personal growth and liberation. No such luck.

Here, the girls hook up with their Uncle Ben, a rich businessman of some sort, and his spoiled trophy wife, moving into their ranch. The movie here splits into two stories when Elly is sent by her uncle to pick up a package with his employee Larry (Steve Sandor). The package turns out to be $300 thousand, so you can imagine what they decide to do about it and, before long, they're on the run with Uncle Ben's two goons out to kill them. Mayhem ensues on that end. Many people have suggested that the two goons in Bonnie's Kids could have been the model for John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson's characters in Pulp Fiction. Since Quentin Tarantino's got very few ideas of his own, it's entirely possible, but hard to say for sure. Neither of them has a "Bad Motherfucker" wallet.

Meanwhile back on the ranch, Myra is getting hit on relentlessly by her Aunt, who's clearly a lesbian. She's playing the Aunt and screwing the stable boy instead, although her real interset seems to be stealing whatever she can get from the mansion. We soon realize that she's a heartless tramp, her sister is about the same, and their Uncle is a criminal thug. Along the way, there are plenty of sleazy touches, like when one of the goons goes to kill a woman in a cheap motel but takes the time to spy on her in the shower first. There's also bloodshed, nudity, and good old fashioned nasty behavior. Recommended.

Monday, February 21, 2011

Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)

A throwback to 50s sci-fi movies with a good amount of 70s nudity, Invasion of the Bee Girls is more fun than it has any right to be. Our story begins in a hilariously crappy fleabag motor lodge where a government researcher is found dead in his room of heart failure do to "extreme exhaustion"- meanwhile, the guy in the next room heard strange humming that he attributed to the television set. Soon, the government has their best man on the case. Admittedly, a middle aged, heavy set man having a massive heart attack isn't exactly a big mystery, so it's not entirely clear why they've put a man on the case; but, okay, plot mechanics ahoy! Anyway, he interviews the dead man's former mistress at length and romance starts

Cut to two pasty, naked motorcyclists making rolling love in the long grass before he drops dead and she walks off making buzzing noises. And in the local frat house, two kids trying to get it on discover a dead frat brother. Clearly, they're not that dedicated to the frat lifestyle since this stops them. Soon, there are enough deaths for the police to warn the public about men dying during sexual intercourse and call for abstinence, leading an angry old fart to call it the stupidest damn thing he's ever seen and insist that he's going to continue, "screwing my old lady and anyone else for that matter!" The local hardhats are pretty convinced it's them damn eggheads in that scientific research center screwin' around with sumpthin or other.

Well, duh. Susan Harris (Anitra Ford of The Big Bird Cage), a sexy entomologist at the institute, who frequently dresses in labcoats without anything under them and huge Gloria Steinem sunglasses, is merging women with bees, a process that involves having women in lab coats with nothing under them strip the patient naked, cover her with a white goop, stick her in a cell full of bees, and then removing the goop and making out with her. And then they all massage their own bare breasts because why not? This is pretty much a 13-year old boy's version of science.

So, the bee girls are killing horny guys by screwing them, with one exception- one of the researchers winds up dead- run over by a car instead of screwed to death. He was homosexual, a fact exposed after our hero discovers his very 70s gay sex pad. Apparently, lava lights mean homosexuality, something I'd always suspected. The Army tries cordoning off the town, but ultimately for the killing spree to end, men have to stop being susceptible to sexy women who want to screw them. In other words, they're doomed.

It's unlikely they were taking any of this nonsense too seriously, but happily the movie plays it straight. It's also about as sleazy as it sounds with nudity a plenty.