BAT PUSSY(Blu ray) AGFA/SOMETHING WEIRD

BAT PUSSY (1970?) (AGFA/SOMETHING WEIRD BLU RAY) Color 50 minutes plus second feature ROBOT LOVE SLAVES (54 Minutes ,1971, color) $21.99 S.R.P http://www.diabolikdvd.com/product/bat-pussy-agfa-blu-ray/

Many years ago, I recall a book on the newsstand called HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN PORNOGRAPHIC MOVIE. It was a how to do it yourself instruction book about editing, sound, camerawork- a basic how to make film book, only about x rated filmmaking.

Watching BAT PUSSY, I felt that the nameless creators of this film had the book on hand, but were missing several pages. This may have been the first porn parody of Batman, though it is far from a good one.

Anyone who tells you that Ed Wood was the world’s worst filmmaker needs to apologize after they see this film.

That is not to say the film is without interest. Quite the contrary. You stare but cannot look away. It is perhaps the most unsexy sex film ever made, and certainly one of the weirdest.

 

It is as if two characters from a local production of WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF decided to carry on their haranguing from the stage to the bedroom. Only here, they are not George and Martha, but Buddy (who looks like an out of shape Bo Hopkins) and Sam (a freckled redhead with a bouffant that would make the B -52’s envious).

(reading? Nahh,just lookin’ at the pictures! )

 

Buddy is reading SCREW (the issue is from 1970, so that is a possible date for when this film was shot over the course of an afternoon.) as Sam lays upon their bed. Buddy decides that they should try some of the stuff he sees in the paper, and so they go at it. Poorly. Buddy is someone for whom Viagra would come in handy some twenty odd years later. No matter what, his Little Buddy refuses to awaken.

 (The Burton & Taylor of BAT PUSSY )

 

The un-erotic oral and fingering sex session leads to a lot of swearing and insults to and about each other. You wonder for whom was this film meant to appeal? Just when we feel that we are trapped in a cell of Hell forever with these two, we cut to another location (it’s almost a shock that we escape, however briefly.).

 

A nightie clad woman lays in a dingy cellar that a scrawled BAT PUSSY HEADQUARTERS on ruled line paper identifies as -well, Bat Pussy’s headquarters! The bored woman senses sex is happening elsewhere and decides she must get there. Every expense is spared on this one take wonder, and on the table in front of her is a paper cup, a can of soda, and some furniture polish spray left upon the table. That’s as far as they go with set dressing.

 

She gets up and whips off her nightie (getting it caught around her head while trying to pull it up) and finds a makeshift costume, transforming herself into BAT PUSSY!

Quick, to the Hopper Ball!

What?

 

Yep, she climbs aboard one of those big rubber bouncy balls with a handle and bounces her way across the screen, along a highway, into a field by a creek (stopping to pee. All that bouncing you know) and into a park where she stops long enough to sock a guy harassing a woman. Then back to her original sojourn. The two in the park are never identified but must have been just friends of whomever shot this flick. Most of this journey is shot in long shot so we feel and experience how slow it is to bounce to an event rather than running or even walking.

 

Finally, Bat Pussy shows up at Buddy and Sam’s , where she is quickly grabbed, undressed, and becomes part of a most unerotic ménage à trois. Finally, it seems Bat Pussy gets bored (or angry at Buddy getting her name wrong, calling her Bat WOMAN), grabs her clothes and leaves. The end. That’s it.

 

 

Did they run out of film? Did they just get tired of each other’s company? Did they have to get the Hopper Ball back to the kids? Who knows? All you will know is that you have experienced something quite weird. Tommy Wiseau all that this film is missing.

 

It is fitting then that SOMETHING WEIRD is the company that “saved” this film from disappearing. Back in the 1990s, Mike Vraney bought a bunch of 16mm films that were abandoned and rediscovered in a Memphis Tennessee theatre, among them was the film that Mike himself christened “Bat Pussy”. There were no title cards, no way to identify who the performers or “filmmakers” were.

 

“Let us punish the guilty. Let us reward the innocent” to quote Ed Wood. That at present is not possible, though the good people at Something Weird certainly tried, along with many others. No one has stepped forward to acknowledge of their involvement in BAT PUSSY.

 

It is thought that this was made for an indie porn theater for local consumption. Seeing how much the distributors made on these films, the local theater owner must have decided that he wanted 100% of the profits.

So, what if the boom mike drops into the shot? No one is coming to see these films for their technical quality. It’s for the trench coat crowd. Look it’s in color and has sound. Yes, the colors were ugly and yes, the sound is dialogue that sounds like Angry trolls possessed by Don Rickles with Tourette’s are talking. It was cheap and ran long enough to live up to the claim it was a feature.

 

It is thought to have been made in Arkansas, due to the accents as well as an Arkansas Razorback tattoo on Buddy’s unattractive posterior. We are told (via the commentary track, more on that later) that this was just a blur in the old prints but thanks (?) to hi-def, we can see this and other little details that once viewed cannot be erased from your mind.

 

 

Back to the restoration (sorry, this film plays tricks with your sense of continuity). The film was from a 16mm print, which may] and almost certainly the only copy still in existence. Like most 16mm films shown constantly, it had wear and tear upon it as well as faded color.

 

Enter American Genre Film Archives (and hopefully not riding in on their own hopper balls). Along with Lisa Petrucci and Tim Lewis of Something Weird, the film was scanned to a 2K  1080p transfer in 1.33:1 ratio. The images are more likely the sharpest that they have been in 40 plus years.

 

That of course is not saying much. No one would confuse the camera work here with that of Geoffrey Unsworth and the “director” is no Kubrick. Set the camera and let it run, and the locked off camera makes me wonder if Buddy, Sam, or Bat Pussy herself were the person who pushed the button and let the camera run, and dashed into the scene, letting the machine run until the film ran out.

AGFA has sharpened the image, but left a lot of the blemishes and scratches to retain its grindhouse feel. The DTS-HD MA English 2.0 mono track does nothing to make the dialogue any clearer and indeed subtitles would have been helpful, though it is interesting to try and understand some of what is mumbled. Does Buddy say he is going to “fuck someone in the nose “?

 

Like most SOMETHING WEIRD releases, this disc has a collection of interesting and eclectic extras:

A theater intro about a minute long warns that the film about to be presented is sexual in nature and if you cannot deal with such things to leave the building. Was that made for legal reasons at the time? Or had someone possibly wandered into the theater thinking this was legitimate Batman tie in feature? I kept waiting for William Castle to warn of Emergo, which would be of a completely different nature in a film like this.

A running audio commentary by is supplied by Something Weird’s Lisa Petrucci and Tim Lewis, Bleeding Skull’s (http://bleedingskull.com) Annie Choi, and AGFA’s Joe Ziemba (also from Bleeding Skull) and Sebastian del Castillo. The team are enthusiastic and laugh along at the nonsense on screen, which would probably be the reaction if you popped it on for other like-minded fans of schlock to view at a party. They also supply as much info as they can on the project, especially on its discovery and rebirth into video and now Blu Ray.

 

THE SHOPLIFTER (Highway Safety Foundation,1964,20 minutes, color) is supposed to be a warning to store workers, but is a how to as well to become a shoplifter!

 

DATING DO’s & DON’T’s (Coronet,1949,13 minutes, color) is one of those sincere but laughably date films that were brought out for high schoolers when teacher needed to rest.

A TRIP TO THE STOREFRONT THEATER (no info ,1970s,2 minutes) has a happy couple go the said theatre and see a guy in a werewolf mask have sex with some bored woman, the couple leaving after viewing this, smiling! Is there a lycanthropic fetish?

CRIME SMUT TRAILERS: a collection of Black & White and color “cumming attractions “from such wonders as THE BLACK ALLEY CATS (1973) and 7 others. A lot of unattractive men ogle and sometimes grind upon some women who probably thought that this was a good career move when they did these flicks.

Speaking of unattractive men pawing prettier young women, we are given another full-length feature, ROBOT LOVE SLAVES (also known as TOO MUCH LOVING, no releasing company info ,1971 ,54 minutes). A soft-core film that at one point had hard core inserts (some of which only remain in its trailer, not on this disc), it is another film where attractive women are once again paired with gangly and just plain ugly guys. I am sure that they looked like the trench coated crowd who went to these films but if these guys were the only choices for the females in real life, the race would quickly go into extinction.

Clark (uncredited) is a geeky, glasses wearing looking nerd (though that could also describe yours truly!) who’s wife (also uncredited) nags her husband for attention (a theme for the two features- Nagging Sex Flicks!).

 

Clark has been busy in the basement creating naked robot female love slaves, beating WESTWORLD (HBO,2016) by a few years. These robots exist for one purpose, pleasure, be it with Clark, his neighbor Harry, Harry’s wife (Candy Samples, who probably is best known as Chief Nellie in FLESH GORDON, Mammoth Films,1974. This may have been one of if not her first film, having begun nude modeling at age 40 sometime in 1968-69), and finally Clark’s wife.

I assume that the filmmakers felt that no one would admit to seeing this film, as they seem to use some famous songs in instrumental versions.I mean,who would admit they went to such a film in the theater ?

The print of this is from a well worn 16 mm copy, with scratches and splices, but it does add to the grind-house feel.

(Something Weird’s DVD-1 )
The final cool extra is a booklet by Mike McCarthy called “I Saved Bat Pussy”.

Having worked in a film storage house, I saw first hand how easily films could be mislabeled and lost ,so I have great  respect for Lisa Petrucci and team continuing the work of Mike Vraney .

 

Lately, SOMETHING WEIRD has been experiencing an odd sort of censorship. Credit card companies for months were refusing to deal with the company, due to S.W. carrying pornographic films! This, from credit card companies that make fortunes due to letting people download porn in hotel rooms, buy in adult stores, etc. It seems that they were targeting an independent company for no good reason, as their argument does survive even a cursory scrutiny.

 

 

By removing one or two titles from their site, Credit Card companies are grateful to once again make money on both purchasers and Something Weird.

 

 

Amazon has decided that the title  BAT PUSSY is too pornographic for their consumers (while carrying kindle porn like “After The Ball Game: Annie Plays With Coaches Bat”-look it up) so it is great that companies like DIABOLIK have stepped up to carry the film.

 

Show your support of these indie companies that support films beyond the mainstream.

 

AGFA & SOMETHING WEIRD have also released (so far )THE ZODIAC KILLER (reviewed by SCARLET https://scarletthefilmmagazine.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/the-zodiac-killer-agfa-something-wierd-blu-ray-released-july-252017-another-son-of-sam-34-95/ https://scarletthefilmmagazine.wordpress.com/2017/08/23/the-zodiac-killer-agfa-something-wierd-blu-ray-released-july-252017-another-son-of-sam-34-95/ ) , and the Ed Wood written THE VIOLENT YEARS (https://www.amazon.com/Violent-Years-Blu-ray-Jean-Moorhead/dp/B073ZWJWQ8/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1512571396&sr=1-1&keywords=VIOLENT+YEARS+blu+ray ).

 

AGFA has also released the long-neglected EFFECTS, created by several people, including Tom Savini, who worked with George Romero. (https://www.amazon.com/Effects-Blu-ray-Tom-Savini/dp/B06ZYRPZH8/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1502209114&sr=1-1&keywords=effects+blu+ray )

Keep up the great work, AGFA ( https://www.americangenrefilm.com/ ) and SOMETHING WEIRD (https://www.somethingweird.com/).

 

RIDE THE HIPPITY HOP!
–Kevin G Shinnick

By the way, if you want to read more, there is even a Wikipedia page about the film. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_Pussy

THE ZODIAC KILLER (AGFA /SOMETHING WEIRD Blu-ray released July 25,2017) ANOTHER SON OF SAM $34.95

THE ZODIAC KILLER (Prudential Pictures ,1971) (AGFA /SOMETHING WEIRD Blu-ray released July 25,2017) Color 86 minutes /plus bonus feature ANOTHER SON OF SAM color 67 minutes $34.95

https://www.amazon.com/Zodiac-Killer-Blu-ray-DVD-Reed/dp/B06Y1C49BD/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1491924197&sr=1-2&keywords=zodiac+killer

 

Back in the early 1980s, I worked in a film storage company . While many television suppliers would keep their 16mm prints with us for broadcast, and studios would have their 35mm theatrical prints (mostly weekend children matinees ,like MAGIC OF LASSIE (Int. Picture Show Co, 1978) ,a large majority of our films sat in boxes and rotting film cans.

 

Located in a pier in Edgewater NJ , our storage facility had the original negative of THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (Fox,1939) as well as NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (Ed Wood ,filmed in 1957, no known release). How these two California produced films negatives ended up in our facility is a mystery. Both were in containers with only lab numbers,without identifying titles.

 

Shipping errors, mislabeling, human mistakes, hundreds of titles ended up misplaced in storage facilities around the country. Some prints were not returned at all ,and ended up remaining in movie theatres, in the hands of private collectors , or buried in cement .

 

 

Add to that film rot (deterioration ) and color shifts (prints turning pink) – it is little wonder that so many films vanish .

 

While major studios have started to preserve their heritage , the independent film, those made outside the system ,or taken by smaller distributors with either shady practices or /and firms that went belly up, a lot of film prints and original elements lay unclaimed in various film labs due to unpaid services or forgotten . Corruption of the film stock had many turn to jelly or dust ,others tossed due to storage fees unpaid.

 

 

Luckily ,in 1990 the late Mike Vraney began the painstaking and time consuming task of finding films in horror and sexploitation ,among the many genres, that he found ,saved from literal oblivion, and released onto the home video market .His hard work turned grind-house filmmakers like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Doris Wishman into cult figures .

 

The incredibly friendly Mike and his lovely wife Lisa Petrucci ,equally friendly as well as his business partner and who wrote up many of the synopses and designed the various covers, were always welcome dealers at various conventions across the country.

 

When he passed , Lisa continued the company , and has kept the legacy of SOMETHING WEIRD alive (check out https://www.somethingweird.com/ ) and now has teamed up with newcomer AGFA ( The American Genre Film Archive ) to restore and release some titles in her catalog onto Blu Ray .

AGFA is a 501(c)(3) non-profit located founded in 2009 in Austin, Texas. AGFA exists to preserve the legacy of genre movies through collection, conservation, and distribution. (Want to donate? http://americangenrefilm.com/about )

 

After a successful Kickstarter campaign ,they are releasing THE ZODIAC KILLER . This is promised to be the first of dozens of titles that AGFA and SOMETHING WEIRD plan to release .

THE ZODIAC KILLER is an incredibly unique film . Created by Tom Hanson who was not involved in film making prior (owning a chain of successful Pizza Man Restaurants) ,his idea was not to make money or for any artistic ambition. Tom felt that his cinematic effort would be a huge aid in helping to capture the Zodiac Killer .

 

The infamous Zodiac Killer claimed his first known victims on December 20,1968 and his last known one on October 11,1969. There are other suspected deaths that are suspected to be the victims of the unknown assassin (he was never apprehended) that go back to 1963 and up to 1970 . The infamous executioner was self named due to a series of taunting and cryptic letters which they sent to the police and newspapers(that continued until April 24,1978) , signed with an enigmatic sketch that resembles a cross hair of a rifle.

 

Hanson thought that if he made a film about the events , the Zodiac Killer would be drawn to see the film ,at which point the filmmaker and friends would perform a citizen arrest!!

 

The plan was the following. Tom Hanson rented out the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco and premiered the movie on April 7, 1971 (the killer had written his Los Angeles Times letter just three-and-a-half weeks earlier). They thought that his ego would draw him moth-like to a flame to see how his story was portrayed.

Somehow ,he got Kawasaki to donate a motorcycle for a prize giveaway.Entrants would fill out questionnaires with the statement “I think the Zodiac Kills because …” and see if an of the entries matched the handwriting of the Zodiac.

To that end, they constructed elaborate and inane traps with which to apprehend their subject ,including a fake ice cream freezer which had an accomplice of Hanson’s within supposedly ready to leap out at the appropriate moment . He must have consulted Wile E Coyote ‘s beloved Acme products, as the person within the box nearly passed out due to insufficient air holes!

Hanson feels that the had indeed captured the mad man at one of the screenings,but had to let them go due to lack of evidence .

The film was also later handled by an unscrupulous distributor and so Tom Hanson ,needing to make money again, stepped away from the maverick world of indie film making. The film was reportedly shot for $13,000,an incredibly small sum to shoot a film even back in 1970.

 

What we are left with is this incredible document of the time .

 

The motion picture you are about to see was conceived in June 1970. Its goal is not to win commercial awards but to create an “awareness of a present danger”. Zodiac is based on known facts. If some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember — they happened. My life was threatened on Oct. 28, 1970 by Zodiac. His victims have received no warnings. They were unsuspecting people like you…
Paul Avery. Reporter
San Francisco Chronicle

 

That is the opening credit to give the film it’s bona fides. Paul Avery was a real life police reporter for the San Francisco Examiner who was drawn into the investigation when he received a Halloween card with the cryptic symbol with the warning”you are doomed” . Avery was later heavily involved with covering the Patty Hearst kidnapping .

 

Having his name associated with the film was meant to lift it up from mere exploitation. The result ,however,while sincere ,is brought down by bad acting and inept technical aspects. That does not mean that the film is without merits.

For one thing, the killings are pretty brutal and sudden . The film also has a dark sense of evil lurking everywhere ,with the killer having the last words :”I’ll be seeing you”.

While claiming to be the true life events of the serial murders, certain facts are played with and a lot of characters who are not involved with the events were invented for the story line .

 

The film is in the end, in spite of all its good (?) intentions , an exploitation film (not that there’s anything wrong with that!!).

 

SOMETHING WEIRD had released THE ZODIAC KILLER prior with two other films on DVD , THE SEX KILLER (Barry Mahon,1967 ,about a Times Square psycho ) and ZERO IN & SCREAM (Lee Frost,1971,a man kills women who reject him in Hollywood). That release is now out of print .

 

This new Blu Ray is a 4K scan 1080p HD transfer from the surviving16mm blow up elements (it was shot in 16mm to be transferred to 35 for theatrical release). The audio is a DTS-HD Master Audio 2 channel track . While the picture quality and sound is improved ,AGFA is taking great pride in not altering or punching up sounds or pictures ,to give the closest presentation to the original release (take that George “let me C.G.I. the soul of it it “Lucas) . Therefore, flaws in the 48 year old film elements remain (some hazing common in 16mm blow ups,and a hair in the gate when it was printed. The sound too isn’t played to jump around your sound system.

 

Other extras on this AGFA/SOMETHING WEIRD release are

 

A brand new commentary track with several of the surviving creative team like Director /Producer Tom Hanson ,Producer Manny Nedwick and several of the AGFA team .

 

A four minute film interview with Nedwick and Hanson have the two discuss how the film came together is material covered in the audio track but it is interesting to put faces to the voices .

 

Finally, a second feature fills out the extras. Whether you think this is a bonus or not depends how much you enjoy ANOTHER SON OF SAM (1977). This film was given a new 2K scan from a 35 mm print.

This film’s most interesting moments are the long list of serial killers going back to Jack The Ripper. I mean it goes on for quite a while. QUITE A WHILE . Almost as if they are trying to delay the start of the movie as long as possible. It finally runs out of murderers to name(though I kept expecting another title to pop up during the course of the film ,reading : “Oh we forgot to mention…”)and we take a leisurely journey down a river, to a couple’s boat house ,and then to a night club where a singer named Johnny Charro,portraying himself , in full lounge lizard attire ,sings “I Never Said Goodbye” ,a tune that rates with “The Words Get Stuck In My Throat”from WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS (Toho,1966) as most responsible for killing nightclubs. Johnny ,by the way ,is still with us and performing .http://www.johnnycharro.com/about.htm

 

“L-l-l-ladies….Johnny Charro”

Finally, just when we think we are watching someone’s vacation films , we cut to a local mental institution . Our killer named Harvey (not a killer bunny) breaks free of his restraints (I wonder if Rob Zombie saw this to inspire his Halloween remakes ?) after receiving electro shock and a sedative (did he hear Johnny Charro??) . A quick flashback implies that Harvey was sexually abused by his mom, causing him to go off on a murder spree.

Somehow ,we try to follow a group of college girls ,whose lives meet up with the killer, and swat teams are called in, and a lot of running around happens ,a few odd freeze frames happen while the sound continues , and mother is called in to confront her son at a police stand off, where he is killed by multiple gun shots (with some of the most obvious blood packs ever used on screen).

The end.

Really.

I watched it twice just to make sure that I didn’t miss something. If anything it seemed more confusing the second time around. Were it not for the sync sound in certain scenes ,I might have thought it was made by Hal Warren of MANOS THE HANDS OF FATE ( Emerson ,1966 ) infamy. It was that level of ineptness. Warren ,however ,had an excuse as he had never made a film before (or after).

ANOTHER SON OF SAM (shot under the title HOSTAGES) was written,produced ,and directed by stunt man Dave A Adams ,who also handled the stunt co ordination .Adams had at least been on film sets before (TRUCKER’S WOMEN ,1975 ,which was released regionally,then on Paragon Video,before Troma picked it up), but you would never know it. Filmed in Charlotte,North Carolina , the film seemed to have been shot in 1975 before finally getting a nominal theatrical in 1977.

 

It is just 67 minutes but it seems ten times longer .This is a film that is crying out for a Rifftrax treatment.

 

 

ANOTHER SON OF SAM is at least much clearer than the old Neon Video VHS copy that was around for years at video stores. That said, poor sound work cannot be improved and this film suffers from a lot of that (though with some of the dialogue,maybe that is a blessing. “No,you can’t come into the shower with me,Henry!”may sound like something sexy is about to happen but the character is talking to a stuffed plush animal!!).

Kudos to AGFA and SOMETHING WEIRD for saving these film obscurities , though your enjoyment will depend upon your enjoyment of
SERIAL KILLER FILMS
1970s EXPLOITATION CINEMA

I assume that if you have read this far, then this Blu Ray /DVD combo is needed for your collection.

This Is Not The End (well actually it is ).

-Kevin G Shinnick