The Ruined Bruin

I've never been a big fan of nudie-cuties, and THE RUINED BRUIN did little to change my mind. Trading in all the lazy hallmarks one associates with the genre - slapdash production values, listless non-storytelling, a longer litany of vaudeville groaners than Thanksgiving dinner with your Uncle Morris - one of the film's few points of interest is that it serves as an early credit for exploitation impresario Harry Novak. Its main other one is probably that it's so hard to see.

Nominal plot finds a bear (guy in a costume, natch) escaped from the zoo. Getting his snout into a pretty young nurse's purse (now, now…) as she sits oblivious on a park bench, the bear ingests some kind of libido-enhancing drug, causing him to seek out pretty women throughout the city while dashing to stay ahead of a couple bumbling zookeepers. There's some other nonsense about a drunk guy the bear keeps running into who sees women in their underwear, but, like most of the rest of the film, it goes nowhere and adds little to the overall experience.

All this probably sounds more interesting than it actually is (as nudie cuties often tend to), and in reality the film – even at only an hour – feels like a bit of a chore. The bear makes some interesting stops along his journey (a sunbathing colony, the Artists & Models Ball, a ride in a helicopter), but the film itself is strangely distractible, devoting way too much time to the drunk character for a movie supposedly about the adventures of a libidinous bear. Likewise, the bear's pursuers, whose presence should give the film its narrative momentum, are so woefully underdeveloped that they show up as an afterthought and barely exert any screen presence at all. Admittedly, I wasn't exactly expecting high drama or nail-biting suspense from THE RUINED BRUIN, but the film still falls short even by that lenient standard, and despite a can't-miss hook like "bear escaped from the zoo sees naked chicks."

What the audience is left with, then, is the bread-and-butter of the genre: a near non-stop barrage of bad wordplay and vaudevillian one-liners. Lame as they are, these corny jokes are still one of the saving graces of the genre in my opinion, as parsing the wordplay at least prevents the brain from totally atrophying while subjected to the nonstop inanities of the plot. In BRUIN's case, maybe one in five jokes land, which is a fairly reasonable success rate for a movie like this. The bear's ludicrous faux-Russian accent makes the proceedings even more surreal, and the entire soundtrack is wallpapered over by this non-stop narration, saving the filmmakers the trouble of shooting almost any actual sync dialogue.

Making matters even more delirious, the print I viewed seemed to been subjected to some form of post-facto censorship, with numerous punch lines and even entire jokes inelegantly blooped, resulting in jarring gaps of silence in the audio. This, coupled with an abbreviated run time (58 minutes versus IMDb's 65, and with no nudity in the entire film!), leads me to suspect the version I saw was heavily expurgated. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine 7 minutes of tits and a few extra bad jokes saving this clunker. Unfortunately, it seems some films really are best forgotten, and THE RUINED BRUIN is probably one of them. I'm already well on my way.