Gums

An interesting movie, full of bad jokes, bad acting and very poor special effect. I really enjoyed it. It will never go down as one of the great porn films of all time, but with Nazis, glove puppets, mermaids and a desperate mayor trying to save the holiday season, all combined into a spoof of jaws, it is well worth one hour of your time. Terri Hall as the mermaid does not speak a word, but i suppose being under water and having her mouth full most of the time, this is only to be expected. As a porn movie, the sex is sparse, short in duration and comical. Overall i would say its a film that you could enjoy as long as you keep your expectations low and take it for what it is, cheap and cheerful.

Jaws (1975) was such a monumentally successful movie that it created the blockbuster model, still used by Hollywood today. It also led to a multitude of movies that followed its basic story template like Grizzly (1976) and Snow Beast (1977), while it spawned a whole host of films featuring water-based monsters. So perhaps it isn't very surprising that it also inspired a porn parody. Gums came out in a period that I am reliably informed was called the golden age of porn; I say reliably informed, as, before a very kind fellow IMDb user sent me a copy of this one, I hadn't actually seen any films from this 70's sub-genre, despite being all too familiar with the names of several which have become so famous as to have become ingrained in cultural reference. Gums seems to be a decidedly more off-beat and obscure offering from this period. It focuses on a killer mermaid who kills unsuspecting male swimmers by lethal blow jobs.

The production values are, needless to say, truly bargain basement. It's to all intents and purposes amateur hour all the way. Not necessarily a surprise though seeing as porn films haven't been very well associated with quality control, beyond the hardcore action. It was kind of surprising though to see just how limited a supply of sex scenes there actually were though. The focus is squarely far more on comedy, although I would volunteer the unpopular view that it wasn't necessarily very good comedy. One thing is for sure is that is most certainly is not very erotic, with the males in particular a staggeringly hideous looking bunch of individuals and I'm not entirely sure which demographic is being serviced by the humping dog scene. What cannot be denied by anyone though is that this is most definitely a very strange movie. There are two somewhat disturbing glove puppets who feature quite prominently latterly in the film, for reasons that elude me; the character who plays the Quint equivalent, called Captain Carl Clitoris, is an SS uniform wearing Nazi, again for reasons that simply elude me. This guy is played by Brother Theodore, who I previously knew as the guy who did some narration for the Al Adamson schlockfest Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970). His performance was commendably committed for something like this and it's that, coupled with the sheer oddball elements that give this one its interest value. In order to pick up the points of interest in this one, you've got to be willing to wade through a lot of tripe though!

When penises start washing up on the beach at Great Head, Long Island, Sheriff Coxswain realizes he's up against a murderous mermaid who gives new meaning to "thar she blows" with her fatal fellatio...

This Triple X-rated riff on the previous year's JAWS has very little missionary but plenty of oral with everyone either giving or getting, even Deputy Dick who pretends to be the mermaid at one point. The "she devil" may not have a tail but she wears a little crown, has a phallic underwater lair, and knows quite a few tricks, including lethal muff-diving and popping up in toilet bowls. Add Nazis, blow-up dolls, vagina sock puppets, a claymation (?) vulture that squirts, and human sex with marionettes and you've got a sophomoric spoof you can't take your eyes off of. Which isn't always a good thing, especially when it flirts with bestiality. You don't see sh!t like this every day, that's for sure. Impossible to rate ...and beware the softcore cut.

Although I'm admittedly far from an expert on the genre, I believe this may be the best XXX parody ever. The story is basically "Jaws", but the shark here is replaced with a naked, deep-throating mermaid (70's porn star/ballet dancer Teri Hall) who doles out fatal hummers to any man who dares to swim naked in the surf. There's some XXX sex scenes--although only oral sex, and only Hall and her fellow 70's starlet Jody Maxwell do their own, uh, "stunt work". (The movie even parodies the fact that obvious "stunt doubles" for all the males are used by at one point having an obviously black "stunt double" for the white sheriff Maxwell is orally servicing). The good thing about this is that the sex (usually) doesn't stop the movie in it's tracks, and while the actors in this were not robbed of any Academy Awards back in 1976, they're a lot better than the talentless walking erections that usually act in porn flicks.

The best by far is the great Brother Theodore in the role of "Carl Clitoris", the Robert Shaw character. He is by far the most talented person to EVER appear in an XXX movie and his hilarious monologues are easily worth the price of admission all by themselves. For the record, his, um, "death scene" does not even use a "stunt double"--it's filmed strictly softcore, since great of talent as he was, no one really wanted to see HIM getting a bj.

They obviously spent a little money on this, even filming some of the final scenes on the open ocean (today they'd probably shoot this on video in a bathtub in somebody's San Fernando Valley condo). There's some great surreal scenes like where the mermaid somehow comes out of toilet(!) to "attack" the "Hooper" character (and his "stunt double"). And at the end of the movie the two male leads are entirely replaced by well-endowed puppets(!) in a scene that really makes me wish that ALL male porn stars would be replaced by puppets. I'd watch a lot more XXX movies if they were half as entertaining as this one.

I bought a copy of this long out-of-print movie on the old Adult Video Corporation (AVC) label for a tidy sum just to get a hold of it un-censored. The box and tape were still in very nice condition despite being manufactured long ago (in 1979).

I watched GUMS right after receiving it in the mail and was "treated" to a insane parody of JAWS featuring horny puppets, a Mermaid who blows men to death (and in one case sticks her head out of a toilet) and a Nazi lunatic played by Brother Theodore who volunteers to capture the Mermaid for oil wells instead of money. Theodore has the "Captain Quint" role in this exercise in sea-going vulgarity. Richard Bolla looks a lot like Richard Dreyfuss and carries around a blonde blow-up doll for amusement. You must see this movie to disbelieve it. Lots of underwater photography of the naked mermaid (Terri Hall) swimming around, but watch out for those lust-mad puppets! Long-delayed edit here: The 'AVC' version of the movie does not have the cartoony stuff obscuring the h/c action, of which there really isn't much of.