Grapvine, Texas, Dec. 18, 2000 (UPI) -- When I first met the great Roger Corman, I asked him, "How do you like being referred to as the King of the B's?"

"I don't like that at all," he said. "The B implies that the movie is somehow second-rate."

"Okay. What about King of the Exploitation Film?"

"Oh yes!" and his face brightened. "That I like!"

But even Roger had places he wouldn't go, taboos he wouldn't touch. That wasn't the case with Dan Sonney and Dave Friedman, who were also laboring away in El Lay in the fifties, sixties and seventies, but venturing into areas that no filmmakers had ever touched ("She Freak," "The Suckers," "The Fabulous Bastard from Chicago") and will probably never touch again.

Dan and Dave were producers who had much more in common with the carnival than with the early days of Hollywood, and their titles were more like circus or vaudeville acts than motion pictures.

"Mau Mau Sex Sex" is basically an hour and a half of Dan and Dave sitting around talking about the good ole days of road shows and four-walling and legendary exploitation stunts. To promote "Blood Feast," Dave posed as a "concerned citizen" in Sarasota, Fla., and asked a judge to issue an injunction against the playing of the film there. He was so convincing that the injunction was granted and, even after Dave withdrew his request, the film was banned! They had to play Bradenton instead.

The very title of this documentary comes from a 1954 travelogue called "Mau Mau," featuring footage of the Mau Mau uprising in Africa narrated by Chet Huntley. Dan Sonney acquired the footage but didn't know how to sell it, so he hired some black actors from Los Angeles to pose as naked warriors, slitting the throats of bare-breasted women, and this three minutes of faked footage was inserted into the movie and used as the trailer.

But it still troubles him because it failed to make money. "'Mau Mau" don't sell," he grouses. "'Mau Mau Sex Sex' would sell."

Sonney is royalty in the world of sideshow-type exploitation, having inherited the title from his father, Louis Sonney. Louis was an Italian immigrant who worked in the coal mines of Washington State, and because of his strength, was asked to take a job as a cop. He single-handedly caught a famous escaped train bandit, Roy Gardner, then went on the Pantages vaudeville circuit as "The Man Who Captured Roy Gardner," demonstrating his strength and his quick handcuffs, used on unsuspecting audience members.

He then financed a movie about Roy Gardner, with a repentant Roy playing himself, and by 1934 Sonney was making oddities like "Maniac," which Frank Henenlotter calls "a wonderfully sleazy creepy kind of film ... odd, exhilarating, incomprehensible" and, not so coincidentally, the first film to feature on-screen eyeball-eating. (Henenlotter, the director and archivist best known for the great "Basket Case," provides hysterical commentary throughout the documentary.)

Sonney was responsible for most of the "wages of sin" films of the 1930s (liquor, gambling and sex lead to the ruin of young women) and the all but forgotten "Forbidden Adventure" of 1937, in which gorillas mate with women in what is billed as an expose of a primitive Cambodian cult.

By the 1950s Louis Sonney and his son Dan had turned to sex as the most saleable commodity they had, and they would frequently make deals with burlesque theaters to film the entire show. Nationally famous stripper Lili St. Cyr was paid a then unheard sum of $5,000, for one day of work on "Love Moods."

Friedman, on the other hand, came up through the carnival, where he shilled for "cooch shows" and used his expertise to pioneer the "nudie cutie" film of the early sixties. Shot at Florida nudist camps, these strangely antiseptic films featured endless shots of happy volleyball-playing nudists, but never showing anything below the waist.

Even though Friedman admits to a long-ago love affair with Playboy Playmate Connie Mason, star of "Blood Feast," the two exploitation legends turn out to be family men who like to play gin rummy and discuss the health of their prostates. (One man is in his eighties, the other in his seventies.)

The men who were once considered enemies of the church, smut-peddlers, and embarrassments to the film industry itself come off as the normal ones, especially when compared to coke-sniffing degenerates like Don Simpson, who produced "Top Gun" and other hits and whose biography drips sleaze all over your fingers. Dan and Dave were, in the final analysis, a couple of swell guys, quaint, old-fashioned, and unfailingly good-humored. You'll enjoy hanging out with em.

One hundred twenty-six breasts. Twelve dead bodies. Gorilla sex. Nekkid trampolining. Rare footage of Dave Friedman's sex scene in "The Pick-Up" (1968) and Dan Sonney's ONLY film appearance, in "The Fabulous Bastard from Chicago." Rasslin. Chimpanzee acts. Vomit bags. Tongue-ripping. Whipping. Burlesque.

Produced and directed by Ted Bonnitt. Four stars.

Joe Bob says check it out.

Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In- United Press International