drspecter

This, like most of Andrew Blake, is pure fantasy. It has a potent sense of sexuality about it, but is not meat and potatoes porn. There is one boy/girl segment, but it's mostly lesbian erotica. The rapid dissolves of slow motion sequences can be an acquired taste, but I guess I've acquired it. Blake's movies feature the most naturally beautiful women in adult films today. Some engage in pretty hardcore scenarios, but some merely flash the camera. His work consists of some of the only adult films worth watching as films currently being made-- though they are pretty plotless. To some, this sense of unrelieved erotic tension will seem dull and pretentious. But if you're like me, it will be intoxicating and hypnotic. Even the light B&D scenes are worshipful of the women, and slowly draw you in rather than hitting you over the head. Andrew Blake's vision is pure fantasy, and not meant as a substitute for sex.

James T Craig plays the hotheaded rocket scientest/madman who mixes a venus flytrap with a carnivorous undersea plant only to create a man in a rubber suit with green dreadlocks in this goofy throw-back to the fifties! With nudity so gratuitous it borders on dadaism!

Wood himself was directing Rick Lutz and Rene Bond in pornos at the time, making this a special treat. More than any other movie not directed by him, this production seems guided by his hand. One wonders if the use jarring library music and lots of stock footage was written into the script. A must!

(AKA: Venus Flytrap)

When I first read Fredric Brown's 1948 novel, I was mesmerized. I have read it a few times since and have no intention of stopping-- it's really one of those forgotten classics of the hardboiled genre. Also being a Fellini fan, I have long been curious to see the film, Anita Ekberg's first starring role, (La Dolce Vita was two years later.) I know that Fellini was a pretty big fan of Brown-- at one point he planned to adapt his sci-fi novel What Mad Universe-- so I'm pretty sure he discovered Ekberg in this film.

Though I think the above reviewer was kind of harsh on Oswald and the cast-- especially Harry Townes, who understates the creepy obsessiveness of Doc Greene very well-- the fact is the movie falls short of the book by a considerable margin. I would put most of the blame on screenwriter Robert Blees, who had previously scripted the giant monster movie The Black Scorpion. But for all its faults (unfortunately, the ending is one of the things they botched) the film has its charms. Not only the cinematography but the music performed by Red Norvo captures the mood of the novel very well. And there are scenes that they actually get right. So I guess it's a love/hate thing for me.

Before I go, one last sidelight. Gypsy Rose Lee, who's featured in Mimi, was an exotic dancer in the forties and wrote one novel, The G-String Murders-- also about a killer who stalks strippers-- which was adapted as Lady of Burlesque, with Barbara Stanwyck.