Sex Kittens Go to College

Sex Kittens Go to College (1960)

1/2 (out of 4)

One of the worst films of the decade has a college needing a new science teacher so a robot picks out one who isn't what you'd typical expect. Dr. West (Mamie Van Doren) is a sexy blonde with big you-know-whats and soon everyone on campus is falling for her. I'm really not sure what the point of this film was unless the producers thought it would be funny to pretend that Van Doren was smart. This film has one of the worst reputations out there and it's easy to see why because this "comedy" doesn't have a single laugh in it that works. In fact, there's really nothing here that works because the entire thing just has a really cheap feel to it and it's clear that it was a rushed item without too much thought put into it. The strange thing is that it does feature a good cast and this here helps keep the film from being a total bomb. I actually thought Van Doren was good in the lead role as she handled the "smart" dialogue just fine and I thought she managed to be charming in the part. Both Tuesday Weld and Mijanou Bardot are nice to look at and we get the likes of John Carradine, Vampira, Jackie Coogan, Allan Drake and Conway Twitty in small parts. In fact, seeing Carradine and Van Doren doing a certain dance is always worth sitting through the picture for. The version I watched was the original theatrical one and not the extended piece that ran 7-minutes longer and featured a striptease. SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE is a really bad movie but at the same time it's certainly bad enough to where it should keep fans of bad films entertained.

"Sex Kittens Go To College" is a terrible film...with lousy writing, dumb acting and not much going for it. However, at least it isn't trying to be a good film and in fact it is trying very hard to be a stupid and terrible movie!

When the film begins, some college decides to hire the perfect professor and they use their computer to tell them the choice. It suggests Dr. West (Mamie Van Doren)--a woman with 15 degrees and with an IQ of nearly 300*! So, without even meeting her, they offer West a position at the school and are shocked when she shows because she's one hot lady...and later they discover she's a stripper! As for Dr. West, she mostly spouts a lot of pseudo- intellectual nonsense which is to supposedly indicate she's a super- genius. On hand throughout the film are a brain-dead jock with some sexual hangups, a group of gangsters, a smart chimp dressed like a student (perhaps Bonzo's cousin), a horny and somewhat dim French student (Bridget Bardot's real life sister) and a LOT of really bad acting!

This movie is much like the later Beach movies (such as "Beach Blanket Bingo")--with very broad acting and writing. It's clearly designed for younger folks who frequented drive-in theaters-- undemanding and dopey. The overall effort is a bit painful to watch and the film is amazingly stupid and just plain bad. Even a guest performance by Conway Twitty (as himself) isn't enough to save this one!

*If you care, IQ scores back in the day were VERY unreliable and lacked real meaning with the old Stanford-Binet. The IQ scores obtained today using the much more widely accepted Wechsler tests top off at about 150...so if you meet anyone claiming to have a much higher score is likely lying, took some online test (that is meaningless) or was tested decades ago.

It's hard to find anything good to say about the writing or directing, though the cheap production quality might be due to a low budget.

Milner (co-producer when that meant something) plays a dim bulb "regular guy", and Van Doren plays a genius with just awful lines, but the rest of the cast (excluding perhaps Weld & Bardot) are playing hopeless buffoons.

The nudity in the robot's dream sequence is surprising, but also poorly danced, and more pathetic than erotic.

I suspect the movie was written in one night over a bottle of bad scotch, aiming at a target audience of high school or immature college frat boys.

It's hard to imagine where they got the budget for Van Doren and Weld, who were in strong phases of their careers.

Zugsmith is of course primarily responsible for the movie... But he also produced Touch of Evil (1958)...?

Oh, it's more insulting to men than women because while the women *in the movie* are treated only like sex objects, the men *in the audience* are assumed to be idiots satisfied by insipid plot, humorless jokes, and dull dialog ... or rather, by T&A.

Collins College is waiting to welcome their new head of the science department, professor Dr. Mathilda West (Mamie Van Doren), with 13 degrees, IQ 298, and 40-20-30. They had used the school computer Thinko to select West. They didn't realize that she is a buxom blonde with unusual effects on everybody. Also arriving on the train are two criminals searching for Thinko.

This is a wacky small sex comedy. It starts with a fun premise but it struggles to go beyond that. Mamie is not a good comedian but at least she can walk and talk. She is Marilyn Monroe without the skills. I'm just not sure if shooting into the crowd is that funny. She does have a monkey. Is that enough? It's definitely not enough to reignite a fun elevator pitch.

A couple of things. Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld. They are the minimum interest in this completely unfunny, shallow, dim, laugh-less, and absolutely atrocious attempt at broad humor and low-brow shenanigans.

Its only train-wreck appeal is the aforementioned beauties. Everything else misses the mark and cannot be redeemed even by those who love to tout its outdated tendencies and point to all the "talent" on the screen.

Mamie, as always, does her best and wears a trademark shiny, skin-tight dress in one segment that is the standout in this hard to get through parade of "didn't anyone notice that this wasn't the least bit funny" one-liners, slapstick, and cheapness. Watch it if you must to laugh at it and not with it, but the bottom line is that this is just sad.

The remarkable thing is its ability to take so many easily recognizable Characters Actors that apart from this, have done reasonably good work and manage, after all, to put on the Screen a Monkey that outshines everyone.