DORIS DECEMBER: THE SEX PERILS OF PAULETTE (1965) ** ½

Before starring in cult favorites like The Honeymoon Killers and God Told Me To, Tony LoBianco made his screen debut in this Doris Wishman flick.  He plays Allen, the boyfriend of Paulette (Anna Karol).  He wants to know why she won’t commit to him, so she tells him the long story of her sordid past.  A long-ass flashback reveals why.

Paulette moves to New York with dreams of being an actress.  She moves in with Tracy (Darlene Bennett) who introduces her to a sleazy agent named Sam (Sam Stewart).  She attends wild parties, is disgusted when Sam and Tracy bang in the floor in front of her, and quickly realizes the Broadway producers won’t give her the time of day.  Paulette tries her hand at waiting tables and when she fails at that, she eventually resorts to a life of prostitution to make ends meet.

Karol is quite good as the innocent waif who slowly becomes corrupted.  Her best scene is when she takes a seductive bubble bath.  It’s also fun seeing all the usual Wishman regulars on hand yet again.  Bennett in particular is becoming a favorite of mine.  She especially looks great while lounging around the house wearing nothing but her bra and panties.  

I’ve watched so many Wishman movies in the past thirty-two hours that when one of her cinematic trademarks appear, it’s cause to triumphantly fist-pump in the air.  A title sequence with black and white photos and snazzy theme music?  Characters taking a walk in Central Park that utilize footage from other Doris movies?  Random shots of feet?  Impromptu dance numbers?  (One of which reappeared in My Brother’s Wife.)  Shots of discarded undergarments lying on the floor?  The same couple of apartments used in her other movies?  All these moments are cause for celebration, and The Sex Perils of Paulette has a lot of them.  

Oh, and how could I forget the lack of synched sound?  Since the whole thing is told in flashback, Doris can get away with narrating nearly the whole dang thing without even attempting to match the actors’ dialogue with their lips.  Oh, and did I mention Doris herself provides the narration?

Too bad Paulette doesn’t get into any Sex Perils until the last five minutes of the movie.  Because of that, it’s ultimately more tease than please, and lacking a generous helping of sleaze.  But as a vehicle for Doris Wishman to trot out all her cinematic fetishes yet again, it works.  Almost.

AKA:  Love Perils of Paulette.  AKA:  Paulette.  AKA:  The Perils of Paulette.  AKA:  The Problems of Paulette.  AKA:  The Depraved, the Demented, and the Damned.

DORIS DECEMBER: PASSION FEVER (1969) *

Doris Wishman bought a Greek movie called Fever, cut most of the footage out, added some new scenes, and called it Passion Fever.  There’s no passion and no fever to be found anywhere.  It’s only fifty-one minutes long.  You’ll wish it was shorter.

Yarkos (Panos Kateris) is a young man who is happy to be out of his parents’ house.  He spends his free time speeding around Greece and looking for chicks.  (“The only thing that makes life worth living is women!”)  Predictably, his womanizing ways catch up to him, leading to tragedy.  

In typical Doris fashion, the opening titles are arranged over black and white photos from the film.  The music that plays over this sequence is a zippy little Greek instrumental.  I don’t know if the music was present in the original version, or if Doris hired someone to make it sound Greek.  Whatever the case, it’s another fun title sequence.  

It goes without saying that it’s going to be poorly dubbed, but the fact that it’s a foreign film probably gave Wishman license to just lean into the shoddy dubbing.  We’ve all seen terribly dubbed foreign skin flicks before, right?  They don’t try to match the lips, so why should Doris?

And with that, I am quickly running out of nice things to say about Passion Fever.  This is a trainwreck in just about every regard.  The editing is so jarring it’s enough to give you whiplash.  First, Yarkos is at a parade, then he’s on the street getting some gal’s number, then he’s sitting on a park bench talking to a friend… all in the space of like a minute.  Stretches like this make you feel like Doris threw the footage in a Veg-O-Matic and whatever got spit out was held together with Elmer’s Glue.  

To give Doris the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that some of the snippets that are missing might have been stolen from some greedy projectionist at a seedy grindhouse for his own collection.  Even then, that doesn’t excuse the slipshod whirlwind back and forth in some scenes.  

The funniest bits are the Wishman-lensed sex inserts.  The way she not-so cleverly tries to crop out people’s faces and heads is a riot.  What’s worse is that it is painfully apparent that the footage doesn’t match at all.  Like, not even close.  As in, the guy in the Wishman scenes is wearing glasses and Yarkos clearly is not.  Boy, oh boy.  

I haven’t seen the original version of Fever, so I can’t say if it’s better than Wishman’s version, but I know it can’t be much worse.  The set-up is sound enough.  A dude driving around trying to get laid.  It’s hard to screw that up.  Somehow, Doris managed to do just that.  

AKA:  Fever.

DORIS DECEMBER: MY BROTHER’S WIFE (1966) ***

My Brother’s Wife features yet another amazing instrumental theme during the opening credits sequence.  Say what you will about Doris Wishman’s technical shortcomings, but her ability to secure legitimately terrific music for her films time and again is simply amazing.  Once again, the theme plays over black and white images from the movie.  Some would call this repetitive.  For me, it’s that kind of serial adherence to form that I respect from my filmmakers.

The film begins with a brawl between brothers in a billiards hall.  Flashbacks reveal how the trouble all started.  It seems the mildly handsome Frankie (Sam Stewart, getting typecast as a nogoodnik in yet another Wishman movie) came to stay with his tubby, bald brother Bob (Bob Oran) and his sexy young wife Mary (June Roberts).  You know it’s just a matter of time before Frankie and Mary are going to be knocking the boots.  Naturally, Frankie breaks her heart, which leads to tragedy.

This time out, Wishman uses voiceovers in a rather respectable manner.  When Frankie and Mary first meet, we hear their thoughts on the soundtrack as they sexually size up one another.  The dialogue isn’t bad either and sometimes takes on a noir-ish quality (which is fitting considering all the double-crosses in the third act).

The usual Wishman touches abound.  Extraneous shots of feet?  Check.  Gratuitous shots of strewn undies?  Got it.  Obviously out-of-synch dialogue?  You bet.  Long scenes of women gazing at their reflection in the mirror?  Yup.  A completely random dance sequence?  It’s here.

It’s those distinctly Doris hallmarks that prevents My Brother’s Wife from being just another run-of-the-mill adult drama.  If you noticed, I called it an “adult drama” and not a roughie.  I hesitate to use that term because it’s strangely… normal for a Doris Wishman movie?!?  Yes, there are scenes where Frankie tries to force himself on women (including Darlene Bennett from A Taste of Flesh), but they are quite restrained… again, for a Doris Wishman movie.   

Yes, this is a surprisingly straightforward entry in the Wishman filmography.  Despite the fact that it is lacking a certain sleaziness that we’ve come to expect from Wishman, it is nevertheless a competent (mostly) drama, and remains effortlessly watchable.  If anything, it was proof Doris could make a “real” movie if she tried.  I mean some of the camera angles she managed to pull off in such a cramped apartment are rather inspired (the POV shot of a stool where Bennett’s ass comes rushing towards the camera is a doozy) and the lesbian lovemaking sequence is positively poetic.    

DORIS DECEMBER: ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER MAN (1966) ** ½

(Originally reviewed November 30th, 2020)

I’m a big fan of Doris Wishman, although I readily admit I much prefer her wild, anything-goes ‘70s work to the nudies and roughies she made in the ‘60s.  Having said that, this one is pretty good.  It has all the hallmarks you’d expect from a Wishman joint, namely:  Awkward editing during the dialogue scenes (to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), random ass cutaways to planters and clown paintings (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound), and gratuitous close-ups of feet and breasts whenever things slow down (again, to disguise the fact she didn’t have synch sound).  

Ann (Barbi Kemp) just got married to Steve (Tony Gregory).  When Steve comes down with a mysterious illness, it leaves their household without an income.  Forced to support her ailing hubby, Ann turns to her former roommate’s lecherous pimp for help, who promptly puts her to work hooking.  Naturally, when Steve finally figures it all out, it leads to predictably tragic results.

A lot of the fun comes from seeing Ann’s transformation from mousy housewife to sexy lady of the night.  By that I mean, the change is almost immediate.  One minute she’s wearing demure wardrobes, and the next, she’s slinking around in a skintight bodysuit and sporting a beehive hairdo.  Her hubby is often hilariously oblivious to the change in her.

Like many of Wishman’s films, Another Day, Another Man looks great.  Wishman’s cinematography is usually on-point, and this is no exception.  The big issue is the odd plot detours that often lead to a bumpy ride.  At one point, the plot stops abruptly and goes into the pimp boyfriend’s backstory.  The stuff with the pimp courting twin sisters into a life of prostitution, and the subsequent subplot about a boyfriend breaking off his engagement because he learns his girlfriend’s a hooker eats up a lot of screen time and gets in the way of main plotline.

Another Day, Another Man is also kind of tame and a lot less seedy than Wishman’s best work.  It’s still fairly enjoyable though.  I’d say it’s about on par with Bad Girls Go to Hell, but it’s far from the dizzying heights of Let Me Die a Woman.

The most memorable part is the awesome music.  The main theme, “The Hell Raisers” by The Syd Dale Orchestra is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.  It later became the iconic Something Weird theme, and if you’ve ever watched one of their videos, you know it will be stuck in your head for days after you hear it.  The rest of the music in the movie isn’t quite as memorable, but it’s still pretty darn good.

The dialogue is often a hoot too; my favorite line being:  “I haven’t seen you since yesterday… and that’s almost twenty-four hours!”

AKA:  Another Day, Another Way.

DORIS DECEMBER NOTES:

1) In my original review, I said Another Day, Another Man was “about on par with Bad Girls Go to Hell”.  Now that I have revaluated that film and elevated it to Four Star status, I would amend that statement and say it’s “about on par with A Taste of Flesh”.

2) Once again, we have another title sequence features black and white photographs.  This one has the distinction of featuring “The Hell Raisers”, the best piece of music Wishman ever put into a film.  

3) Like Gentlemen Prefer Nature Girls, our heroine has a boss who doesn’t approve of married women working.  Is this a reoccurring theme of strong women rallying against patriarchal expectations and outdated mores?  Or is Wishman just repeating herself?  

4) Another reoccurring element that has been cropping up during Wishman’s roughie period is the random cutaway to a discarded undergarment lying on the floor.  It’s not as pronounced as the shots of feet, awkward telephone conversations, and bad dubbing, but it’s becoming more and more prevalent in each passing movie.

5) Sam Stewart, who had a memorable role in Bad Girls Go to Hell, plays yet another lout who likes to smack women around.

6) Another reoccurring element in Wishman’s roughie period:  The downbeat ending.  All the characters walked happily off into the sunset (nude) in her nudie era.  With the exception of A Taste of Flesh, Wishman’s heroines in this period are left to a depressing fate.  

7) Like The Prince and the Nature Girl, Wishman once again resorts to stealing footage from her earlier movies, in this case, Bad Girls Go to Hell.

DORIS DECEMBER: A TASTE OF FLESH (1967) ** ½

A Taste of Flesh kicks off with a great opening instrumental theme song.  It’s not quite up to snuff with “The Hell Raisers” from Another Day, Another Man, but it is definitely a toe-tapper.  (Luckily for Another Day, Another Man fans, “The Hell Raisers” appears later in the film.)  In fact, all the music in the movie is top notch and helps give it a larger than life feel that a low budget, apartment-bound sex flick might not have otherwise had.  Naturally, like Doris Wishman’s other roughies, the theme song accompanies black and white photos of what we will see throughout the picture.  

The plot is essentially a remake of Suddenly, but because it’s Doris Wishman doing the remaking, it’s Suddenly, but with Lesbians.  

The film begins with a great bubble bath scene where Hannah (Peggy Steffans) is soaking in the tub.  Her friend Bobi (Layla Peters) interrupts Hannah and begins putting the moves on her.  From the awkward cutting to the blank, lifeless expressions on the actresses’ faces, it’s hard to tell if this scene is supposed to be consensual or not.  That just makes it that much more bizarrely fascinating.  

Hannah is in the city for a few days and stays with Bobi and her lesbian roommate Carol (Darlene Bennett).  A pair of gunmen worm their way into Carol’s apartment and take the ladies hostage.  It seems a foreign dignitary happens to be staying at the hotel across the street, and Carol’s apartment has the perfect vantage point for an assassination attempt.  While waiting for the dignitary to arrive, the men amuse themselves by beating, harassing, seducing, and raping the women.  

Because of the cookie cutter plot, you might be inclined to think A Taste of Flesh is going to be more like a “real” movie than a Doris Wishman skin flick.  It’s not one of her best, but if you’re patient, there’s some Wishman-y goodness in store for you.  The foot shots and scenes of dialogue occurring while the actress speaking the lines is off screen are a given, but the most entertaining aspect of the film comes in the form of its padding.  About halfway through, the plot stops dead in its tracks for a long dream/fantasy scene where Bobi dresses like a man, has a romantic champagne toast with Hannah, and then takes her to bed.  Another unnecessary but welcome scene involves Carol undressing, looking at herself nude in the mirror, and then rolling around on the bed for no good reason whatsoever.  

A Taste of Flesh has its merits, but it falls short of some of Wishman’s other roughies.  While there are a few novel bits spread throughout, it’s nothing crazy enough to put it over the top.  The ending is a bit rushed and unsatisfying too, which doesn’t help matters.  

DORIS DECEMBER: INDECENT DESIRES (1968) ***

(Originally reviewed November 11th, 2021)

A slack-jawed loser named Zeb (Michael Alaimo) finds a Kewpie doll in a trash can and brings it home.  He cleans it up, makes a little shrine for it, and he soon learns it possesses a voodoo doll-like quality.  Whenever he fondles the doll, the sexy Ann (Sharon Kent) feels it.  Zeb fantasizes about making love to her, and when he realizes he can’t have her, he takes to inflicting pain on the doll.

Indecent Desires is a nutty black and white skin flick full of whiplash-inducing editing, overwrought music cues, random shots of people’s feet, poorly dubbed dialogue, and awkward telephone conversations.  That could mean only one thing:  It’s a Doris Wishman movie!

As far as Doris Wishman films go, it’s pretty good.  It offers a nice balance of your typical softcore action with enough touches of S & M (albeit in semi-supernatural form) to appease the raincoat crowds of the roughie market.  The plot is silly to be sure, but it’s a solid hook for this sort of thing.  It’s also just novel enough to make it a mini-classic.  It certainly helps that Wishman’s pacing is brisk as she swiftly gets you from one scene of Kent undressing to the next.  

Kent (who was also in Wishman’s Too Much Too Often!) is a real presence, always looking sexy in her skimpy outfits and while undressing down to nothing.  Dramatically, she does a fine job of conveying her character’s bewilderment at having phantom orgasms.  Jackie Richards, who plays Ann’s sultry brunette gal pal Babs, is great too.  She looks hot while doing nude ballet exercises and has a memorable scene where she gets so worked up looking at herself nude in the mirror that she has to make out with her reflection.  Richards also participates in a brief foot fetish scene, which allows Wishman to combine her two passions, shots of feet and softcore sex into one sequence!

In short, Indecent Desires is highly desirable for Doris Wishman fans!

AKA:  Indecent Desire.

DORIS DECEMBER NOTES:  

1) Indecent Desires keeps up the theme of using moody jazz accompanied by black and white still photographs for the opening credits sequence.  While I do miss the fun songs from Doris Wishman’s Nudie Years, it’s a good fit for the off-kilter antics that follow.  

2) The scene where Zeb meets Ann for the first time is fucking great, and the shot of the Kewpie doll superimposed over Ann’s body is as Martin Scorsese would say, “Cinema”.

3) Likewise, the scene where Babs makes out with her own reflection can only be described as “Cinema”.

4) And the scene where Babs randomly does nude ballet exercises?  “PEAK Cinema”.  Seriously, Babs needed her own spin-off movie.

5) Wishman’s trademarks like awkward phone conversations, bad dubbing, and random shots of feet are in full effect.  However, the interior scenes are reminiscent of Bad Girls Go to Hell.  The scenes of Zeb moping around in his apartment are quite claustrophobic, and hammer home the character’s sense of isolation, and the stuff where Ann does domestic chores and feels shame for having her indecent desires is thematically similar to Bad Girls as well.

6) One interesting way that the film is different from Bad Girls is the way the heroines handle their trauma.  While Meg repeatedly runs away from abusive situations, Ann locks herself in her apartment and refuses to go out, for fear of being assaulted again.  

7) The film might not be as visually impressive as Bad Girls Go to Hell, but the print is very good, and certainly a vast improvement over the version I saw a year ago.

8) Although Indecent Desires isn’t as consistently entertaining as Bad Girls Go to Hell, its many peaks easily outweigh the occasional valley.

DORIS DECEMBER: BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL (1965) ****

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL  (1965)  ** ½

(Originally posted July 17, 2008)

In the ‘60s, Doris Wishman was the Queen of the Nudie Movies.  This one is sleazier than most.  Meg (Gigi Darlene) is a housewife who gets raped by a janitor.  She kills him with a candy dish and high tails it to New York where she moves in with a handsome guy.  He turns out to be a drunk and beats her with a belt.  After he passes out, she kisses him goodbye (!!!) then shacks up with a lesbian.  Meg tells her she’s an “acrobatic dancer”, but all she really does is stand on her head.  The lesbian puts the moves on her, and she splits.  She rents a room from a couple and the hubby rapes her, so she leaves and gets a job taking care of an old woman.  When her son comes to visit (he comes in through “the front door” which is clearly a CLOSET!) he turns out to be a detective looking for Meg.  And then… it was all a dream!  Wow.  With all the Wishman trademarks:  lots of bad dubbing and lots of close-ups of feet.  Wishman also did Diary of a Nudist and Double Agent 73.  

BAD GIRLS GO TO HELL  (1965)  ****

(Critical Re-evaluation, December 7th, 2022)  

When we think of artists having different “periods” that define their work, we mostly think about painters and sculptors.  However, Doris Wishman is one of the few directors to have very distinct periods throughout her career.  That was mostly because of the market demands and shifting trends within the adult movie genre.  Doris, ever the chameleon (and workhorse) never met a subgenre she didn’t like.  The eras of her work are so pronounced that the AGFA Blu-Ray boxset is broken up into three parts.  Bad Girls Go to Hell is one of the films that defined Wishman’s time in the “roughie” genre and is one of her best.

Wishman’s nudie films ran about seventy minutes or so, but they often felt much longer.  At a lean, mean sixty-four minutes, Bad Girls Go to Hell flies by.  The first thing we notice is the music in the opening credits.  Gone are the sunny, upbeat theme songs that populated her Nudie Period.  It has been replaced with moody jazz that is a perfect fit for the starkly photographed pictures that accompany the title sequence.  It nicely sets the table for the rest of the film.

With Bad Girls Go to Hell, Doris seems to be leaning into her cinematic fetishes/limitations.  The effort to synch up the actors’ lips and dialogue is much more relaxed (READ:  Slipshod), and the random shots of feet could be put into the Louvre.  Whereas Wishman was using the weird cutaways of feet to fit to cover herself in the editing room during her nudie era, here, the foot photography has an eerie, gothic, dreamlike quality to it.  

There are also some truly bizarre touches that I just love.  Like when our heroine, Meg (Gigi Darlene) takes a shower with her husband.  Usually, a shower scene is memorable unto itself, but it’s the random bit where she kisses a portrait of two cats before she enters the shower that will stay with me.  Another touch I loved was the way Gigi wipes her attacker’s blood off her face by licking a tissue and dabbing it as if it were stray spaghetti sauce.  And of course, there’s the hilarious scene where a front door is portrayed by a closet.  

I first watched Bad Girls Go to Hell on VHS as a part of Joe Bob Briggs’ “The Sleaziest Movies in the History of the World” series.  I’m not sure how many Wishman movies I saw before then, but seeing it hot on the heels of the films in her Nudie Period, it feels like a revelation.  The black and white photography is beautiful, a sharp contrast to the sunny color cinematography in her early career.  The print is flawless too.  The film was always one of Wishman’s better looking films to begin with, but this is the best it’s ever looked.  Bravo, AGFA.

Also, much of the movie takes place indoors, another big difference from the nudist camp era.  This is also psychologically important as the claustrophobic surroundings feed into the psyche of Meg.  The drab domestic scenes where she dutifully does housework are miles away from the bright sunshine days of carefree nude shuffleboard.  When the film does open up and steps outdoors, Doris’ lens makes the seedy New York streets look foreboding and surreal.  Carnival of Souls by way of film noir. 

As inept as some of this is, the first rape scene is surprisingly shocking and effective.  The chaotic editing and camera placement perfectly puts the audience in Meg’s disoriented state.  The leering close-ups of her attacker and the shots of her frightened face pack a punch too.

Of course, the inept stuff is a lot of fun too.  Meg’s time spent with the lesbian (Darlene Bennett) in a bad blonde wig is a hoot.  The part where she claims to be an “acrobatic dancer” and randomly performs handstands, backbends, and crabwalks for her new roommate is the kind of scene that elevates Bad Girls Go to Hell from mere exploitation to bizarre art.  It’s just so out of left field that you have to admire it.  

Bad Girls Go to Hell is ultimately a film about guilt and shame.  Whenever Meg is attacked, she runs away from her problems, unwittingly setting off a chain reaction and dooming herself to repeat the cycle yet again.  I love it when a director takes one idea and does repeated variations of a theme/cinematic fetish for reel after reel until they finally have a movie.  This wouldn’t be Wishman’s first or last rodeo in that regard, but it is one of her most effective.