Okay, let’s get the ugliness out of the way.  Two thoroughly wretched, utterly awful Grindhouse offerings – they are not, by anyone’s definition, movies – are Scent of Love (1970) and The Screentest Girls (1969).  Each offers what the writers/producers/directors thought paradise might be if they had the means to convince attractive young women to get nekkid.


In Scent, the inducement is an aphrodisiac aroma and in Screentest it is the offer of stardom.  Both give us a series of long, single-cut, single-take scenes with nekkid women dancing around, standing around and flopping around as the camera moves with something that resembles Brownian motion – chaotic, mindless and constant. 

 The Scent of Love

1970

There is one scene in Scent, in which a guy is supposed to be giving a gal oral pleasure, but because this is soft-core, they can’t show his tongue in the holiest of holies, so the director/cinematographer tightens focus on the back of the guy’s head, and all you see for a good 30 seconds is a bunch of hair.  His hair.  A guy’s head. Now, that is so very arousing – real erotic stuff.

The women in Scent of Love are veterans Casey Lorraine (Casey Larrain) and Kathy Hilton, doing a guy and each other.

Lorraine



Hilton



Hilton also takes on a guy unassisted.

Scent also has a couple of unknown women, one of whom plays with a bathroom scrubbing brush



... and another who sort of, kind of participates in the Casey/Kathy orgy, as seen above. 

The Screentest Girls

1969

By the time I set to work on The Screentest Girls I had – to quote Chris Rock – a pocket full of fucks and I did not give one of them.  Wanted nothing more than to just get it over with. 

There is something decidedly meta about a movie (sic) that shows the casting process as good for little more than getting women to undress and pretend to do themselves, do guys and do each other.  Two of the women – Mary Jane Shippen and Phyllis Stengel – were long-time, long-serving veterans of grindhouse fare.

Shippen



Stengel



Bonnie Cooper was a third participant, who appeared in a half-dozen movies in her career.

 

Those three knew exactly what they were doing from the get-go, but there is fourth woman, a cute young gal – easily the most attractive of the group – who is known to no one because this was her only appearance on screen, or so it seems.  And she is either the very best actress in the bunch or she felt seriously, honestly awkward through the whole thing.

Unknown



Unknown with Mary Jane Shippen

You gotta bet the guy who made this crap, by the name of Zoltan Spencer, did in real life what his character does in the movie.  He promised her fame in Hollywood just to get her out of her clothes.  That makes the movie very and unintentionally meta. 
 
And a sidenote to the celluloid defecation that is The Screentest Girls: Bonnie Cooper was in it and also she played bit parts in The Notorious Cleopatra

and The Joys of Jezebel

– both were Grindhouse movies but they were fun to watch and a joy to capture.  That is something we should all expect from movies with a dozen nekkid women running around, right?  Well, anyway, the late Tuna and the very-much-alive Oz capped both movies and, god bless their little hearts, they posted many frames of women they could not identify at the time.  I went through them, now that I know what Bonnie Cooper looks like, and sure enough, there she was; the collages above are based on Tuna’s captures.