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
scarletthefilmmagazine 