Boogievision

A few good laughs to be found which i was not expecting. Riding off the waves made by The Groove Tube and the Kentucky Fried Movie, Boogie Vision is a decent satire concerning the exploitation film racket of the 60's/70's directed by James Bryan whose filmography is notoriously hard to track down, but what's life without a few challenges? Still trying to find Lady Street Fighter and Dirtiest Game in The World at agreeable prices. I won't hold my breath.

It's not as mad or rough-shot as i expected. This is no Executioner Part II thank god, but it has still got problems, most of them budgetary. Still, it's a fascinating contemporary reflection upon a fascinating time in film-making.

What would you get if you gave a movie camera, a couple of hours worth of film, and a few thousand bucks to some hippies in 1977? The answer might well be "Boogie Vision," an amusing time capsule that proves if nothing else that virtually anything could get distributed to drive-ins back in the day. I'm reminded of "Mr. Hand" from Fast Times at Ridgemont High who was convinced every single student in his American History class "must be on dope." Mr. Hand would undoubtedly think the same of every single person involved in this movie. Something of a "Groove Tube" knockoff, much of the footage consists of unrelated comedy sketches including mock news reports, commercials, and random shots of nude skateboarding. There is also some strikingly good 70s animation that reminds one a little bit of "Yellow Submarine." But there is also a main plot (using the term loosely) that does its best to hold the film together. A would-be movie "director," who has to panhandle every penny and dime he can to buy rolls of film, suddenly hits the jackpot after his girlfriend informs him that her daddy is a "producer." Turns out daddy really only makes porn and has little intention of letting this guy direct, but hires him anyway to just to appease his daughter. Well, wouldn't you know it, daddy is called away for a few days so our lead protagonist seizes the opportunity to blow an entire film's budget in three days to create his own artistic vision. Needless to say, daddy, upon returning, is none too impressed with the result, which comes to be called "The Lizardwoman from Outer Space Meets the Radical Feminoids." But with the money blown and the film in the can, he really has little choice now but to distribute it. One might conclude whoever put up the money to finance "Boogie Vision" was left thinking the same thing. Oh, man, this movie is weird. I'll give it a 5 for its unconventional spirit. For better or worse they sure as heck don't make 'em like this anymore.

Apparently people in the seventies laughed at anything, even crap. Boogievision is proof of that. Then again I don't smoke tons of wacky tobaccy like everyone else who thinks this kind of film is funny.

It tries hard to be like the early (overrated) years of Saturday Night Live, The Groove Tube, and Kentucky Fried Movie but the jokes are more embarrassing than hilarious.

The structure of Boogievision is also pretty bad. There's the main story of the hippie film director who looks a bit like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. In the first scene he exposes a badly run sanitarium in a scene stolen directly from a young Geraldo Rivera! After that he becomes decidedly more immature and stays pretty much unlikable throughout the film.

His trials and tribulations while trying to direct a crap movie aren't very interesting or sexy, despite loads of full frontal nudity.

Then there's the badly written TV parodies that litter the place, cutting in at random intervals. Though marginally more entertaining than the story of the film director, they're still pretty bad unless you think dildos are funny.

Do yourself a favor and get high before you watch this!

I bought this because I've been a fan of "The Groove Tube" and similar movies like TunnelVision (I have a 35mm print of that!) and Kentucky Fried Movie, and the DVD cover claimed it was of that genre- the title Boogie Vision just about guaranteed it'd be a great movie also. Well, I just watched it and was a bit disappointed- it's more a conventional narrative about the guy making the movie, then a few random things are just thrown in (5-second news updates, a few commercials and a couple promos for phony TV shows) just to pad the running time. The animation at the beginning is pretty cool though and must have cost more money than anything else in the movie.

Recommended only if you have to see every movie made in the 70s, or just a fan of bad and/or weird movies in general.

Boogievision (1977)

* (out of 4)

Michael Laibson plays Mick, a young filmmaker who thinks he has gotten his big break when he learns that his girlfriend's father is a producer. The only problem is that the producer wants a porno movie but the young filmmaker wants to make a science-fiction film.

As I go through the films of director James Bryan, I can see why this movie was made. He started off making sexploitation movies before making two porno titles with Rene Bond. I'm going to guess that he wasn't overly interested in making the porn movies but he had bills to pay and they were jobs. It seems this film here was his way of saying that but sadly the end results really aren't all that good.

Again, I can see what Bryan was going for here but it just doesn't work because the satire is just poorly written and nothing here is overly funny. Another problem with this film is the fact that its 80-minute running time is really dragged out to the point where you're bored out of your mind before you hit the half-way point. The film is edited in a fairly strange way and add in the boredom and you can quickly lose track of where the plot it.

There's a little bit of nudity but certainly not enough to please sexploitation fans. This one here is basically just for those who want to check out everything the director has done in his career.