"*** 1/2 (Excellent)"
Videoscope Magazine, by The Phantom
Debuting documentarian Ted Bonnitt does and ace job explicating and celebrating the exploitation films of yore in this affectionate, informative winner. Bonnitt intercuts well-chosen clips from such cheesy chestnuts as Child Bride, Forbidden Love, Mau Mau and many more, charting the shifting tides of the exploitation biz through the ages, from the early sex flicks to atrocity films to 1960’s roughies and nudie-cuties. Bonnitt places his main emphasis, though, on a pair of seminal senior exploiters, longtime friends Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman, who, separately and together, stocked drive-ins and grindhouses with no end of then-sordid fare. Bonnitt gives us ultra-intimate portraits of two very different men. 84-year-old California resident and devoted family man Dan essentially inherited his lifelong business from his dad Louis, and Italian immigrant who stumbled into it when, while serving as a small-town lawman in the Pacific Northwest in 1919, he chanced to conk and capture notorious desperado Roy Gardner. Roadshow fame soon followed as Louis joined several carnivals where he would tell of his heroics, later joined in the act by a paroled Garner himself. Louis soon graduated into the roadshow film production and distribution business, eventually enlisting a reluctant (son) Dan as his assistant. 77 year-old Alabama native Dave, on the other sleight of hand, ditched a promising mainstream Hollywood promo and sales career to rule over his own exploitation empire, teaming not only with Sonney (The Defilers, She Freak) but with H.G. Lewis, with whom he birthed (Caesarean all the way) the modern gore genre with the infamous blood trilogy (Blood Feast, 2000 Maniacs!, Color me Blood Red). Both Dan and Dave speak with admirable candor here, while auteur/film historian Frank (Basket Case, Frankenhooker) Henenlotter lends his on screen expertise and Something Weird Video honcho Mike Vraney pays tribute to the pair while leading them on a tour of his film vault. Despite its somewhat brain-damaged title (derived directly from a Dan Sonney remark), Mau Mau Sex Sex succeeds in taking us inside a bracingly sleazy universe, one rescued from oblivion by new-breed exploiters like Vraney who’ve preserved this at-once entertaining and educational legacy on video for generations to come. Summer 2001 |
 |