The Grindhouse Era, Part 9: The First Nudie Sketch Comedy

Today’s foray into grindhouse is a story of a beta version of an idea, full of bugs and rough edges, made closer to marketable after a lot more work a lot later on.  The final, memorable version of a sketch comedy on the silver screen is Kentucky Fried Movie (1977).  The beta version was called Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In (1970).  Zap-In has some strengths. One of them is the answer to the question, What is the lowest form of humor?  Slapstick?  Knock-knock jokes?  Puns?  Nope, it is Miss Nymphet’s Zap-In.  You can, with nothing but confidence, say that is the answer to the age-old question, because of the sheer number of atrociously penned and acted things that someone must have thought were jokes.

The other strength is 11 recognizable actresses and 1 unknown who spend some time unclothed.  These actresses include some familiar names, including Bambi Allen

 and Cathy Adams (who is, herself, the beta version of Kate Mara).

Uber-cutie Debbie Osborne, in an unintentional full-frontal (see the first collage)

and the uber-exuberant Dixie Donovan

are the highlights of the movie, and the reasons I gabbed it in the first place. They were grindhouse legends despite the limits to their filmographies. And the red-headed wonder, Luanne Roberts, also appears but - I am sad to say - in only a scene or two.

Phyllis Stengel shows up in the largest number of sketches and has, by coincidence, the longest list of movies to her credit.  The camera was not all that kind to her in Miss Nymphet,

but if you look at other movies, such as 1971’s Wow Cindy, you see how good she could look with the right director of photography.

Wendy Winders and Julie Conners

are topless go-go dancers who fill in the spaces between sketches.  Their total screen time may be 5 minutes, but it is the same thing over and over again, which proves that yes, indeed, two topless women can be boring.

Two actresses named Fern Tom



and Mary Jane Shippen

appeared in Miss Nymphet and not much else.

And then there is Loray White, who you might remember from The Notorious Cleopatra (she is the African-American woman who played the Greek-Egyptian pharaoh with a New Jersey accent).  Cleo and Miss Nymphet are the only performances in which Ms. White is in some state of undress, which I figured would make her performance worth seeing.  Good heavens, was I ever mistaken.  I know the movie is fifty years old, but I am embarrassed for everyone involved - writers, director and Ms. Loray White - that she was put into scenes as an African cannibal and asked to ham it up.  The movie, throughout, was terribly unfunny; her scenes were the terribly unfunniest.

There is another actress I did not recognize.

 

From the collages and clips you will see the video was made from a print that had been roughly handled - it has scratches and spots and anything else you can imagine to obscure the content.  The phrase, better than nothing, kept coming to mind as I worked on this project.