Midnite Plowboy

Softcore sexploitation filmmaker Bethel Buckalew was really a man ahead of his time. Long before anyone else, he was making movies that completely dispensed with anything remotely resembling a plot in order to focus one one long sex scene after another. I don't personally consider this a good thing, but I can't dispute that the guy was a true pioneer of sorts.

The title of this movie is, of course, a porno parody of the much more well-known Hollywood classic "Midnight Cowboy". If you find the title hilariously funny, then get ready to laugh! But if not, the movie itself is NOT gonna get any better. A dimwitted country bumpkin comes to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune. He doesn't find it, but he does fall ass-backwards into a whole lot of sex. He first gets picked up by a swinging couple and he and the wife take turns going down on each other in the back seat while her perverted husband watches from the front in what is a pretty long sex scene, but an incredibly short road trip from bumf**k Alabama to Los Angeles. He then wanders into a brothel in Hollywood and goes to bed with ALL the prostitutes even though he is a hayseed schmuck with no money. He is then hired to drive around a van/mobile cathouse. He falls in love with a prostitute (Debbie Osbourne) and, well, actually that's about it.

Buckalew actually made a number of sex-saturated, Southern-fried "hicksploitation" films (he was kind of the Colonel Sanders of softcore smut). The only difference here is that most of this film takes place in Los Angeles, so he didn't have to pass off Californian locales as the Deep South. Many of the girls are also surprisingly pretty--not just average-looking actresses with nice bodies like Sharon Kelly or Talie Cochran (but then they're not even remotely talented like Kelley or Cochrane either). The best is Debbie Osbourne who plays his love interest "Bernice". (If you like her in this, check her out in "Cindy and Donna" where she plays the horniest female teen virgin in the history of female teen virgins). This about the tenth Buckalew film I have stumbled across by complete accident in the last year (he was either very prolific or he is stalking me in some weird way). They are ALL pretty bad, and this one is about the same as the rest.

Midnight Plowboy is one of director Bethel G. Buckalew's greatest films in his all too brief career. While not as good as Boys Will Be Boys, Midnight Plowboy is a hilarious spoof of the pretensious 1969 film that stole the Oscar from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. John Tull and Nan Cee are the breakout stars of this film and should have had productive careers in the industry except for the public's stupidity of not noticing true visionaries of film. The public prefers films like the Godfather and the French Connection. This movie parodies such so called serious classics and shows true depth and symbolism that is only matched today by a genius like Andy Sadaris. Midnight Plowboy is a true forerunner of such films like the Toxic Avenger and the Vice Academy. The Wizard of Oz was not a success when it was initially released in 1939, why not Midnight Plowboy? Mark my words, in the near future Bethel G. Buckalaw will take his place next to Orson Welles as a cinematic genius.

Junior is an innocent Southern farmer. He knows how to play this role, for he did it in the similar movie Country Cuzzins before. One day he decides to go to Hollywood. His travel ends in a cat house, where he soon does odd jobs.

Softcore porn, entirely made in the style so popular around 1970: lots of nude females, hardly any shots of male genitals and weird positions for the love making, most of which prove nothing actually happens. The female cast is good looking, the male cast isn't. Except for John Tull of course. He overacts terribly, but it fits his role. The first half hour is funny, but then sex becomes too dominant. The remaining 50 minutes are quite boring.

Don't think you will see a spoof of Midnight Cowboy, for this is just sleaze without the impact of that movie. In the 1970's and the beginning of the 1980's lots of porn movies were made bearing titles referring to famous main stream movies. And 99% of them suck.

Just for the bearable (and sometimes even almost funny) first 20 minutes I rate this flick 3 out of 10.

As of today, the vote count on Midnite Plowboy was sixty nine votes, placing it at "6" out of "10". I wanted to say something a little more positive about this movie. Sure, the plot and acting are just hideous, but the editing, sound, and picture quality were miles ahead of the others making similar type C grade flicks with unknown actors and low budgets. John Waters, Morrissey and Warhol, and Robert Downey Sr. had been making films with silly plots and bad acting for years now, and Buckalew used the theme of a Southern Hillbilly story (The Beverly Hillbillies were on TV in 1962, so even that idea wasn't really new) Lots of "simulated sex" and nudity by both males and females (mostly the good looking female prostitutes) in cars, fields, and living rooms, but there is just enough of a plot to keep the viewer interested. John Tull is a farm boy "Junior" who claims to be 19 but looks more like 29. Tull starred in a bunch of writer/director Bethel Buckalew's hillbilly films. Junior heads out west, and ends up living with some "working girls" in Los Angeles. Smooth sailing for a while, but then the owners of the brothel accidentally move in on the turf of the local hoods, and that's where they run into trouble. We follow along on Junior's adventure, and laugh as his southern drawl, complete with a stutter, comes and goes. Sure, it probably deserves that "6", but i'll give it a 7 just for the fun-factor and some funny lines. Fun to watch if you keep your expectations reasonable. This is part of a producer Harry Novak two-pack DVD, which also has Country Cuzzins. Distributed by Something Weird Video.