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By
the mid-1940s and the close of World War
II, the draconian Hayes Code, which
said what could and couldn't be shown on
movie screens, was starting to show a few
cracks. Exploiting these new fissures were
a group of independent filmmakers, who
were doing their damndest to get a naked
body on the big screen -- and out of the
stag reels in the Elk's club's basement.
Sure, nudity was nothing new. Pioneered
with Kroger Babb's Mom
and Dad,
disguise any film as a documentary (Bowanga!
Bowanga!)
or educational (Test
Tube Babies),
and you could usually sneak it past the
local censorship boards. If that failed,
they resorted to the old "square-up
reel." The exhibitor usually had two
different versions of the film -- one
cleaner version used to get past the
censors, and then the other that they
planned to really show, complete, once
they got the OK. If he smelled out the
cops, the tamer version was shown until
the authorities cleared out, and then the
"square-up reel" would be tacked
on at the end to show what everyone had
missed.
Then
came the burlesque movies -- nothing more
than a static recreation of an old
vaudeville show, consisting of corny
comedians and comely strippers, which
opened the door for the nudist films (nature
films, nudey camps and volleyball games
etc.), and in particular, a film
called Garden
of Eden.
For it was with this film, after a lengthy
court battle, a ruling was handed down
that "Nudity, on it's own, had no
erotic content and therefore is not
obscene."*
*
Quoting
from RESEARCH
#10: Incredibly Strange Films.
It
didn't break the Hayes Code's back,
but it turned the cracks in its foundation
into full-blown breach. And what followed
next, starting with Russ Meyer's The
Immoral Mr. Teas,
was a new type of film that combined the
corniness of the burlesque shows with the
not-quite full-frontal of the nudies --
and thus the Nudie Cuties were
born. Voyeurism was still the game: Lot's
of looking, but no touching -- from the
audience, or the characters on screen.
Just a parade of beauties, and a lot of
teasing, teasing, teasing, and a whole lot
of corn -- that's a Nudie Cutie in
a nutshell. And when this cycle started
petering out, oddly enough, monsters
started showing up, giving the genre one
last hurrah with the likes of Kiss
me Quick,
and this week's film, House
on Bare Mountain,
before the real monsters and
psychos started showing up (but
we're getting ahead of ourselves a little
bit.)
*
* * *
Now,
it's usually at this juncture that I
give you the plot description of the
film, but that would be admitting that House
on Bare Mountain
had a plot to begin with. And to do so
would prove God fallible -- thus
starting a chain reaction that would
null and void the entire universe. And
who wants to be responsible for that?
Not me. Heck, no.
Okay.
Okay. Fine...
The
plot, I think -- and stress on the think,
revolves around Granny Goodbody --
producer Bob Cresse in drag -- and
her school for wayward young girls. And
Cresse's take on Goodbody is a flattering
carbon copy of comedian Jonathan Winter's Granny
Fricker character in the same way
Sammy Petrillo was flattering Jerry Lewis
in Bela
Lugosi meets the Brooklyn Gorilla.
Anyway, Granny's curriculum for her girls
consists mostly of spending a lot of time
in the shower, getting ready for bed,
lounging around the pool, or exercising
around the grounds of her mansion. Of
course, everyone -- except for Granny,
thank god -- is topless and sometimes
bottomless (but
only from the rear.)
The
film opens with Granny in the clink. Why?
Well, as a side operation, she has an
illegal still out of her basement run by
her pet werewolf, Krakow. (Make up
provided by Harry Thomas, and it's just as
shoddy as his work in Frankenstein's
Daughter.)
Granny was suspicious that a spy was in
her midst, and spends most of the movie
trying to ferret the mole out.
Things
reach a climax at the Halloween Jamboree:
In an extended sequence, each border is
shown flopping down the steps to call
their dates, begging them to sneak a
bottle into the dance. They all do, and
the punch is spiked to around 190-proof.
The mole reveals herself, calls in the
cops, who raid the place, while the party
degenerates into a drunken dance orgy
complete with the Frankenstein's monster
doing the watusi.
And
that's about it, except for the twist
ending. Turns out Granny got all the cops
drunk, too, and keeps them all imprisoned
in her basement, forcing them to work the
still. (She wasn't in the clink,
they were.)
The
End
In
the relatively tight circle of early
sexploitation film pioneers, the only
person disliked or more reviled by his
peers than Alan Shackelton was probably
Bob Cresse. Dave Friedman (The
Defilers,
Scum
of the Earth),
a long time collaborator, called him
"a closet Nazi" and Harry Novak (The
Pigkeeper's Daughter,
A Scream in the Streets)
threatened to throw him through a
plate-glass window if he tried his strong
arm tactics on him; and for the record,
those tactics usually included a .38 and
two body guards for persuasion and bill
collecting.
Cresse
started as a messenger for MGM, but felt
there was more money to be made
independently -- especially concerning
subjects the big studios weren't allowed
to do. Striking out on his own, he founded
Olympic International Pictures whose
simple motto was "Art for the Sake of
Money." Getting his feet wet writing
and producing Once
Upon a Knight
-- a tale of an insurance investigator
whose allergic to naked women, Cresse then
got involved with the House
on Bare Mountain
by bailing out producer Wes Bishop, who
ran out of money one day into production.
Cresse hooked up with another long time
collaborator, director Lee Frost, and
inserted himself into the picture as the
star, ad-libbing the whole thing, and only
shot one more day of footage, and then
spliced everything together. The ad-hoc
style of filming shows up badly during the
brief running time (it
barely breaks an hour). There just
ain't a whole lot there, and what is
borders on tedious, and the thing never
gels and lacks the over-all delirium of
the far superior monster-cutie, Novak's
Kiss Me Quick.
Despite
the earlier court rulings, some local
censorship boards were still throwing
their weight around. When the film
premiered in Boston, the Chief of Police,
claiming to have seen a little bit of
snatch during the film, raided the theater
and shut the movie down. Demolishing the
projector, he arrested them and burned the
negative on the sidewalk for the
gathered press outside (he was up
for re-election). Cresse
counter-sued for destruction of property,
and since the evidence was destroyed,
giving the cops no case, he won a
settlement.
The
end was soon nigh for the Nudie-Cuties
though. Soon the giddy colors and jiggling
scenery were replaced with the darker,
grittier and nastier Roughies as
the teasing gave way to sex with violence.
The characters starting fondling each
other, and more, but usually just wound up
beating the crap out of each other;
evidenced in the bondage and sadism of the
Olga movies; the Findley's sleaze
and necrophilia -- and if you thought the
lobster claw assault in Kiss
of Her Flesh
was bad, check out the corn cob scene in The
Ultimate Degenerate.
Gah!; and then the all out gore-o-ramas
of H.G. Lewis and Friedman (Blood
Feast,
2000
Maniacs
etc.) officially put an end to -- no
matter what there was to look at, c'mon
admit it with me -- one of the dumbest
genres off all time.
Cresse
went with the flow, churning out the
wonderfully sleazy Mondo
Bizzarro,
The
Animal,
the truly nasty western Hot
Spur
where
a cowhand kidnaps and tortures the boss's
wife, and The
Scavengers,
his take on Peckinpah's The
Wild Bunch,
only here, the rapes are in slow-motion,
and he was also responsible for the very
first, and some think the worst, of the
Nazi-sexploitation-sickies Love
Camp 7 where he has a little too
much fun playing the Commandant -- if you
know what I mean. And can there really be
a worst in this sub-genre?
And
by most accounts, Cresse was just as big a
misogynist misanthrope in real life as he
was in that film. It's my understanding he
had a two-way mirror in his office that
gave him full view of the ladies restroom
-- that lets you see what, exactly? Shower?
Sure, but a restroom? Which makes what
happened to him next even more bizarre.
While taking his dog for a walk along
Sunset Strip, down an alley, Cresse heard
a woman crying for help. He investigated
and found two men who appeared to be
assaulting her. Pulling out his trusty .38,
Cresse told them to back off. But one of
the men pulled out his own gun, shot
Cresse in the stomach, then shot and
killed his dog for good measure, and then
informed Cresse that they were police
officers making an arrest.
While
recuperating from his injuries, Cresse
bled his accounts dry with medical bills.
Broke, he dissolved his partnership with
Frost and bowed out of the production
business, taking a few bit parts here and
there, and at one point wound up skipping
the country to get away from his
creditors. He eventually came back and
died of a heart attack in 1998, ending one
of the strangest runs in filmdom.
I'll
admit there is something refreshing about
watching these old nudie films, and that's
the -- for lack of a better word, naturalness
of the eye-candy on display. No silicone
perfection, or over-fixed grotesqueries,
and no waifish heroin chic. They are what
they are, tan lines and all; cute and
solid and comfortable, and there ain't one
damn thing wrong with that.
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