April Exploitation/B-movie Challenge 2016 - Day 10

I was given a Youtube link to DIVINE WATERS, a somewhat rare 1981 documentary on John Waters and the Dreamlanders. The film features interviews with John Waters' sister and parents and clips with Edith Massey, Divine, and others along with Waters himself. I hadn't seen any of this footage before so it was all interesting and entertaining despite clocking in at just over an hour. I think there have been better documentaries, and of course more complete now that DIVINE WATERS is 35 years old, on Waters and Divine but this one is definitely worth a look.

It's time! It's time! It's women in prison time! You can't have a month of exploitation and not dig into some WIP films? Well, maybe you can but I can't. So first up was BARE BEHIND BARS from 1982. This movie starts out as a wonderfully sleazy, skin filled, lesbian prison romp with a couple dozen prisoners getting off whenever they get a chance to visit the infirmary and have fun with the nurse and her dildo (the 7th Wonder of the World.) This movie goes fucking bonkers when a trio of girls plan an escape, but not before seeing the 8th Wonder of the World... a rather giant sized dildo made out of a pineapple. Yes, you read that correctly. A pineapple dildo. Yum. That's nothing compared to when the three girls break out, take a family hostage and murder them but not before castrating the father and tossing his weiner to the dog. Oh and the little boy, who can't be older than 10 (and I'm probably pushing it there), well let's strip him down while 3 grown women rub on him sexually before killing him too. The mother got it easy. That's not all, there's more dick chopping, and this time it isn't the dog that it's fed to and some hard XXX action out of nowhere. BARE BEHIND BARS went fucking nuts in the last 20-25 minutes and I loved every seedy, uncomfortable, mind baffling second of it even more than I loved the first hour.

And we close things out with AMAZON JAIL, from Oswaldo de Oliveira, the same director as BARE BEHIND BARS. This film that came two years later is obviously set in the Amazon and features a lot more action outside of the jail setting itself which kept things fresh. There's plenty of skin and sex along with jungle dangers like venomous snakes. The girls are stuck between white slavers and crazy native priests all looking to keep these girls for themselves but the girls fight back in a three way war of sex and survival. Entertaining, and filled with filth AMAZON JAIL was a lot of fun to watch but never reached the level of BARE BEHIND BARS.

Today's Rundown
Divine Waters - 6/10
Bare Behind Bars - 8/10
Amazon Jail - 7/10

April Exploitation/B-movie Challenge 2016 - Day 5

I was long overdue to visit the earlier films of John Waters so I did just that. I started with MULTIPLE MANIACS which features Divine in the lead role where she runs the Cavalcade Of Perversions with her group of freaks including homosexuals, junkies and fetish acts to exploit the audience for their cash or down right murder them for it. It's all in a day's work! Then there's the "Rosary Job" scene with Mink Stole as she turns Divine into the lesbian that she wasn't a few minutes before. There's a 15 foot rapist lobster, there's more murder and drugs perversion and everything that is trashy and wonderful. MULTIPLE MANIACS would easily have the cult following that Pink Flamingos has if it would only get an official DVD or Blu-ray release. What a fantastic film.

I then took a step further back, one year further back to be precise to Waters' 1969 film MONDO TRASHO which is nearly a silent film aside from some voiceover work creating very sparse narration and dialogue. This film is referred to as The Gutter Movie as it was literally filmed in gutters, alleys, and abandoned places around Baltimore. I didn't have the love affair that I did with MULTIPLE MANIACS but it was great to see Waters' and his crew of Dreamlanders really beginning to mesh and get their chemistry together, especially Divine who seems to just be dipping her toes in the waters that she would jump into head first a year later and then years later become a drag and cult film icon. There's plenty to like here but it is a lot of experimenting with ideas and styles that would later become fully realized by the God of trash cinema.

I finished the day with EQUALIZER 2000, another Cirio Santiago post-nuke film taking place in the barren and blistered wasteland that was once Alaska. Now a desert but still rich with oil, it's a wild blend of car chases, shoot outs, fire, mountain people that look more like the Fillipino actors they are than the native Alaskans I assume they're supposed to be. There's a lot of bad acting and cheesy dialogue and I eat up every second of it It's not quite the great time that Wheels Of Fire was but I still highly enjoyed it up to the very end where in celebration everyone throws loaded guns into a fire to signify their new found peace... I can only laugh at how bad of a time they had seconds after the film cut to credits and live ammo heated up and began going off.

Today's Rundown
Multiple Maniacs - 8/10
Mondo Trasho - 6/10
Equalizer 2000 - 7.5/10