The Girl from Pussycat

Those pesky daughters of Sappho are at it again, beating down guys and picking up tricks, before graduating to robbing a bank. The kinky NYC late 1960's roughie in a nutshell, featuring b/w photography...noisy out of copyright classical music gang-banging in your ear holes...people hiding out under fake names ('Gay Lamour', 'Roman Hans') in order to bring lifelong fetishes to the screen...a narrative that is big on female on male sadism, but goes nowhere other than a succession of explicit sex scenes that impatiently anticipate the arrival of hardcore a few years later. Settings are the skeevy couches and floors of skeevy rooms, with the occasional exterior cutaway to streets so mean that you fear for cast members' safety (especially the seemingly unscripted moment where an actress gets checked out and hit upon by two non-actor passersby). All acted out by pussycats dishing out dirty book dialogue ("I'll get my boots to take care of him") in the direction of men who wear dark glasses, keep their socks on, and aren't remotely convincing as heterosexuals. A wonderfully evocative, dirty skin flick, all too obviously made by a man who longed for the day when he'd be tied up, whipped and lose his gal to a bull dyke.

This film dates from 1969 - shortly after the Hays Code collapsed under the weight of multiple threats from TV, foreign films and domestic disobedience.

However, despite that, this cheapo effort has every man still clad in underpants (and sometimes socks) as they grapple with multiple women - some also retaining their knickers.

Briefly pretending to flesh out the official "plot" of a supposedly-professional bankrobbing girl gang, most of the "action" is actually devoted to the lesbian and hetero shenanigans that were presumably the main attraction for the then-contemporary audience, who had yet to be lost to the imminent hardcore tidal wave (or the newly-acceptable softcore content of mainstream hollywood). Apart from a short inventive scene featuring a toaster, that's pretty much it.

Admirably short, and worth a look if this sounds like your kind of retro fun, but it's really not very good.

If the mark of a great movie is how much nudity one could fit in around an hour, this black and white number from the swinging '60's would be Oscar winning. Not worrying about silly little things such as plot, or anything so trite as that. The film seems quite content to string tame soft-core (VERY soft-core) sex scenes together under the paper thin guise of an 'essay on lesbianism' and hope for the best from the raincoat crowd. Funnily enough the movies greatest asset isn't really it's content at all, but rather the fact that it shares a DVD disc with "Kitten in a Cage", a supremely horrid film that makes this one seem like an unmitigated bonifide classic. At least this one is worth a few chuckles.

My Grade: C-

Something Weird's DVD Extras: 4 Vintage soft-core film loops ("Friendly Kitten", "pretty Kitty from Kansas City", "Young and Kittenish", "Kute Kitty"); 6 and a half minute gallery of Harry Novak exploitation art with accompanying soundtrack; 10 minute photo gallery slide-show; Theatrical Trailer; And Trailers for "the Fat Black Pussycat", "house of Cats", "the Pink Pussy where Sin Lives", "Platinum Pussycat", "Pussycat Paradise & A trip around the World", "3 Loves of a Psycho Cat" & "Kitten in a Cage" (the last of which is also on the double-feature DVD)

I love exploitation flicks – but this one does not measure up to even the lowest standards.

This is a film in black and white that is very low budget. It's an ultra soft porn that looks like it was shot is someone's apartment. One mild sex scene after another, loosely strung together with a nearly non-existent plot. No real frontal nudity. And how do I hate those obviously fake sex scenes where the men leave on their underwear.

The only redeeming factor about this is that – like all movies from this era – the girls look like girls. No tattoos, no piercings, no fake breasts. A couple of the thin ones actually qualify as eye candy.

Like most of SWV's pre-1970 stuff, this one is not worth buying and really isn't even worth a rental. The Novak stuff from the 70's at SWV is much better.

Give this one a pass.

Ah remember the time when tan marks helped you identify the naughty bits you hungered for and were not supposed to see? Tanned, Ok but edgy, white, oh lord spare me the sins and decadence.

So what could get you antsy and horny in these pre seventies? Well, lots of easy sex with girls without inhibitions and guys with over-filled knickers, they are smoking after sex, smoky during and barely lit before.

Very sweet in some way as to what phantasms were but very boring as well. And the classical music playing out loud as background won't change that movies and sex are still a missed encounter.

Watch something else.