ON SCREEN
THE FILM THEY DIDN’T WANT YOU TO SEE!- On Screen
| Mau Mau Sex Sex Feb. 1 - 4, 7 & 9 p.m. Metro Cinema Zeidler Hall, Citadel Theatre **** (out of five) Wisdom of the Ancients says you gotta get past the gravy before you get to the meat – unless you don’t take gravy, in which case what’s the matter with you? – and I’m not going to mess with Ancients, so, here’s the gravy: Mau Mau Sex Sex is filled with hot chicks. Not hot like you can turn on any old Internet and find; Mau Mau Sex Sex is about two pioneers of the "exploitation" genre of film, the flicks the fellas used to fire their rockets with in the days before you could get hard-core porn in the grocery store, so we get to see many clips of the kind of girls – the ’50s and ’60s kind of girls – they just don’t make (or, at least, they don’t make up to look like) anymore. Round rumps and apple cheeks and… Yeah. So, there’s your sex angle. Your "sex gravy," if you must hold me to the metaphor. And now that you’re hooked (thanks to the irresistible bait: gravied meat), you get reeled in only to find that Mau Mau Sex Sex is not the pants-shrinking expose of the high-rolling wild world of ’60s celluloid sleaze you thought (hoped? dared to dream?) it might be, but is in fact a hilarious, warm-hearted portrait of two sharp old guys who made their living in an incredibly cool manner – namely, making films about tribal drug-addicted sex-maniac hookers (undressed), boozy mad scientists who can turn into animals (and thus get to see girls undressed), and thrill-crazed teen sadists with magic glasses that give them the power to see girls undressed. Also, nudists. The press packet says that the New York Times says that Dan Sonney and David Friedman are the "Sunshine Boys of Smut." Good enough. Director Ted Bonnitt’s documentary gives us 80 minutes of these two senior citizens reminiscing about their biz – from "nudie cuties" and heroin lunatics (and remember: these are warning films produced to educate the public about the dangers of vice [wink]) to S&M "roughies" and a frankly unbelievable mockumentary about jungle women makin’ it with apes – and going about their daily lives, Dan in octogenarian retirement and Dave still conning the suckers and greasing the cops as proprietor of a travelling carnival. And this is the meat. Mau Mau Sex Sex is in truth only secondarily about the exploitation genre, a genre which makes our on-screen film-expert pal, Mr. Frank Henenlotter (director of such lost masterpieces as Basket Case and Frankenhooker), almost vibrate his head apart for sheer wonderment. The real substance is these two old dudes, and their wicked glee – and pride – at having done what they did, raising families and supporting kids while being damned to hell for giving the people what they want. Dan, born into exploitation as the son of a hero cop-turned-showman, shrugging deadpan about the business end of things and exercising his bad hip. Dave, the former studio PR guy who loved writing lurid ad copy, cackling about his triumphs of smut marketing and encouraging a new generation of suckers to "win a bunny" on his midway. The two of them together, trading stories, arguing about who’s more full of shit, and congratulating each other on their healthy prostates. I’ll call it inspirational; two laughing hucksters who turned moral outrage into money and lived to tell the tale, who changed the way the world looks at moving pictures on a shoestring and a handshake. There’s not a lot of deep genre analysis, or even a lot of social context, but there’s plenty laughs and chills and thrills and topless women – that is to say, pure and perfect entertainment – to be found in… MAU MAU SEX SEX! THE FILM THEY DIDN’T WANT YOU TO SEE! |
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