One Shocking Moment

One usually thinks of writer/director Ted V. Mikels as the creator of grade-Z schlock. Boring, artless trash like "The Astro-Zombies", "The Corpse Grinders", et al. Incredibly, this crisply produced little sexploitation drama shows a sense of style and professionalism wholly absent from his later hack work. Where did it all go?

Newlyweds Cliff and Mindy move to decadent Los Angeles and are instantly sucked into a vortex of sin and depravity. Cliff ogles their sex-pot neighbor Joanie (nude model Maureen Gaffney) who works at a swinging club with belly dancers. They befriend the club's owner, Tanya, a tough, man-hating lesbian who takes a shine to Mindy. Tanya (well played by Verne Martine) is the most interesting character. She tosses a drunk guy out of the club, bitch-slaps her lesbian lover Joanie for a lapse in obedience, and moonlights as a dominatrix. In an especially memorable scene she beats the crap out of a submissive male client with a bull whip.

While Tanya and Joanie make the moves on Mindy, Cliff starts fooling around with a secretary from work. Everything comes to a head at a wild party at Tanya's. This simple story is well told, beautifully filmed, and the nude scenes are surprisingly restrained. All in all, an interesting curio that falls somewhere in between the roughie and nudie-cutie subgenres.

One Shocking Moment (1965)

** (out of 4)

Ted V. Mikels produced, wrote and directed this film about Cliff (Gary Kent), a husband who moves himself and wife Mindy (Lee Anna) from Grand Rapids, MI to Los Angeles, CA where soon afterwards their marriage starts to fall apart because he starts to see the wild side of the city. ONE SHOCKING MOMENT certainly isn't going to shock people today but at the time you can see why it probably drew in some audiences. At the same time, you can't help but think that some of the raincoat crowds were disappointed because this really isn't like most of the sexploitation pictures from this era because Mikels actually wrote a decent screenplay and there's a lot more character driven stuff than just your typical non-stop nudity. Don't get me wrong as there's quite a bit of nudity from start to finish but this here is never the main focus of the film. I was really surprised to see how much plot was here and even more shocking is the fact that the film remains entertaining for the most part. I found the performances to be better than you normally see in this type of film and especially by Kent who would go onto appear in some pretty big drive-in pictures. As with a lot of these films, this one here can't fully hold its 71-minute running time so the final fifteen-minutes or so really drag. Still, fans of the genre or the director will still want to check it out.

I'd got used to the relatively high quality of the Nicolas Winding Refn updates of "classic" trash films - so it was quite disappointing to find that the sound on this was all over the place... almost inaudible dialogue in some places, and lots of hiss and crackle in others. Also, some of the dialogue and acting in this one is definitely in the "so bad it's bad" category.

There is a fairly decent plot, and some of the acting is OK - so it is watchable for all its faults, but I can't really see myself recommending it to anyone else.

PS The sexual politics in this are of course from a different age - so it's perhaps invidious to criticise just for reflecting that - but I did feel that the "cautionary tale with lesson learned" finale might just mean that he would pull back from full pervert to being an "ordinary misogynist", rather than any more fundamental reform?