Monday, December 16, 2019

THE CURIOUS FEMALE (1970) **


The great earthquake of 1969 turns Los Angeles into an island.  In the year 2427, the world is ran by a “Master Computer” that outlaws sexual morality.  The swinging rebels of the future gather to watch underground sex films from the 20th century and have orgies.  First, they watch a faux-silent movie called The Vacuum Salesman. 

The rest of The Curious Female is devoted to the second smut film the futuristic people watch called The Three Virgins.  It’s about a man who uses a college computer dating service to find a virgin.  Pearl (Charlene Jones) is an African American with an abusive home life.  Joan (Bunny Allister) is engaged to a med student who’s sexually frustrated because she wants to wait for marriage.  Susan (Angelique Pettyjohn) is a stacked tease.  Occasionally, we cut back to the future where the perplexed moviegoers ask questions about the characters’ antiquated sexual views.

It almost feels like the futuristic wraparound footage was added to pad out the running time. Either that or it was unfinished, and the filmmakers just cobbled something together at the last minute to create a releasable product.  It’s probably the later because one of the futuristic women comments that there’s a reel missing from the film because “the producers ran out of money”!

It’s ironic that the slapdash, silly sci-fi framing device is more entertaining than the swinging ‘60s scenes of computer dating and sexual misadventures.  These sequences just aren’t funny or sexy.  At least the futuristic stuff has a certain cheese factor to help make it watchable.  It also doesn’t help that the film gets progressively worse as it goes along.  It especially turns sour once the girls begin losing their virginity, which is the exact opposite of what you think should’ve happened.  The opening credits sequence in which the groovy title track plays over pastel colored images of pussycats and nude women is a lot of fun though. 

Joan’s mother gets the best line of the movie when she tells her daughter, “I want you to be a virgin, but I don’t want you to be a hermit!” 

AKA:  Curious Females.

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