Friday

 

 

  • * Yellow asterisk: funny (maybe).

  • * White asterisk: expanded format.

  • * Blue asterisk: not mine.

  • No asterisk: it probably sucks.

OTHER CRAP:

Catch the deluxe version of Other Crap in real time, with all the bells and whistles, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Sensuous Nurse

1975

Part2:

Carla Romanelli film clips

samples below

Luciana Paluzzi film clips

samples below

some other chick's film clip

samples below

 

Scoop's notes:

God bless those guys at NoShame Films, whoever they might be, for bringing The Sensuous Nurse to DVD. They did everything right.

The Sensuous Nurse is one of the great Italian sex farces of the 60s and 70s, but nobody has known that for a couple of reasons. First, it has never been available on DVD. Second, the available video tapes were not only of inferior quality, but were significantly expurgated as well. Although the film runs more than 100 minutes long, various video versions have been as short as 77 minutes. This DVD not only restores the film to its original full length, but also preserves the original widescreen aspect ratio, and has been digitally re-mastered from the vault negatives. The DVD even includes a 23 minute featurette about the film. Such a feature is rare for any 30-year-old film, let alone one which originally ran in Italy's "seconda visione" circuit (roughly the equivalent in quality of America's drive-in circuit).

The low IMDb rating is just crazy. I have to assume that the people who assigned those low grades must have seen the truncated versions, and that those versions must have been edited down to incoherence. The full version not only looks good, but it works quite well, both as a lowbrow comedy and as erotica. There are sexy scenes; there are funny scenes; and there are funny sex scenes. Oh, sure, the humor is crude. It consists mainly of mugging and lowbrow hijinks. The liner notes mention that this film is basically like a Benny Hill sketch expanded to feature length, and that's true, but it's such good-natured, irreverent, over-the-top fun that I found myself laughing out loud several times, almost against my will. The politically incorrect comedy is just the icing on the cake, because the primary appeal of the film is not one but two naked Bond girls: Ursula Andress (Dr. No) and Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball). Luciana didn't remove her panties, but I think this movie presents your only opportunity to see her ample bosom. Ursula showed it all, again and again, and looked magnificent doing so. Pretty Carla Romanelli also supplied full frontal and rear nudity in a comic role, and one other woman stripped stark naked just to get her nipples tweaked by Jack Palance while he was making a phone call.

The plot concerns a rich old man who has a heart attack during sex with a younger woman. Expecting his imminent demise, his family has just about divided his possessions when the family doctor presents them with the bad news: he might recover. The doctor has two things to add: (1) the old man would surely die if he had a second heart attack; (2) he will need constant care and, given his financial status, can and should be attended by a full-time nurse. His scheming nephew thinks about these medical recommendations and realizes that if the two points were to be combined into one, it would be a sinister and profitable plot. What if the old man had a full-time nurse so gorgeous that he would have to mount her, thus causing his second heart attack?

Enter Ursula Andress.

Andress eventually comes to realize that the old boy is quite a good fellow, while his family consists of a bunch of greedy sycophants, so she backs out of the scheme, falls in love with the old man, and ...

... well, I think you can probably take it from there.

Some of the family members are hilarious. One of the nephews is a retired war veteran who seems to think he's still in the army, and re-creates various military exercises and maneuvers around the grounds of the estate, complete with military music played on a powerful sound system. His nemesis is the local drunkard, who loves to play pranks on him by sabotaging his equipment. Those two characters, and their rivalry for the affections of the gorgeous maid, fuel much of the comedy.

Without really thinking it through, I started watching the film in English with English sub-titles, and that turned out to be a great idea, because the translations were radically different, and sometimes one of the two came up with a much funnier way to translate the Italian jokes into English equivalents. You will miss some of the humor if you choose only one or the other. The American English dubbing is surprisingly good - not good in the sense of "co-ordinated with the lip movements," but good in the sense of "actually employing real actors with a deft comic touch." Although I lack sufficient skills to understand the Italian soundtrack, I have to think the American actors probably did an excellent job at conveying the humor of the original Italian script.

I thought I was watching this film in order to record the nudity dutifully, but I ended up enjoying the hell out of it, dumb though it was. I recommend this DVD if you have any interest in the Italian sex farces of that period, or in the beautiful women in the cast.

 

Risk

(2000)

 

Claudia Karvan film clips

samples below

 

 

London

(2005)

 

Jessica Biel film clips

 

 

 

 

Pics

Here's a collage of that Bonnie Bedelia topless scene in the pilot film for Then Came Bronson

Chelsea Field in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Bobbie Tyler in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man

Mitzi Martin in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (exotic beauty who nearly disappeared from the face of the earth after this film)

 

Take one or two lines from every action picture ever made, stir. Add an extra pinch of Roadhouse and Hudson Hawk. You have HD&MM. I think Road House is probably the most comparable movie, because they both have unbelievable over-the-top villainy, the violent death of the best friends of the protagonists, absurd macho posturing, hilariously (intentionally??) bad dialogue, cartoon violence, and professional wrestlers in the cast. I guess Terry Funk was too old for this one, but they got Big John Studd to fill in nicely.

In fact, the wrestling theme is appropriate, because if you read what I wrote in the previous paragraph, you'll see that both of these movies could, in fact, be running plot threads for the WWF. If you told me Vince McMahon wrote them both, I wouldn't be surprised for a minute. A biker and a cowboy could easily be a WWF tag team.

Where to begin? Biker Mickey Rourke (Harley Davidson) and sharpshootin' rodeo cowpoke Don Johnson (the Marlboro Man) have a good friend, an elderly father figure, who is about to lose his road house (trapped among skyscrapers in the middle of a future Burbank) so that the suits can tear it down and build another skyscraper. His lease expires in two weeks, and the bank wants $2.5 million cash for a new five-year lease.

So our heroes have only one choice, of course, they have to rob that very bank to pay off the lease. The rob the armored car, but are immediately confronted by two surprises:

1) The armored car's back-up is five guys in bulletproof Kevlar overcoats (including a lesser Baldwin). Since they arrive in their limo within about a minute of the heist, one assumes that they drive around LA all day long in these long overcoats, carrying their automatic weapons.

2) Our heroes give these bulletproof guys the slip by sneaking down a manhole into a truck they had hidden in the drainage canals, only to find that instead of money they managed to hijack a zillion dollars worth of a new, dangerous, highly addictive drug.

So now they have to work a deal where they trade the drugs for some cash. The bulletproof guys do the swap uneventfully, but they show up at the Road House a few minutes later (turns out they planted a homing device in the money), and they kill everyone in there except Harley and Marlboro. This means that they slaughtered four of our boys' best friends, including the old geezer who owned the Roadhouse.

Now the boys are really pissed, so they escape from the bulletproof guys by jumping 15 stories into a hotel pool in Vegas, while the bulletproof guys rain down machine gun fire from the roof into the pool. Did I mention that they got to Vegas in the luggage compartment of a jet? Macho guys don't worry about any of that sissy cabin pressure stuff. Then they fight back against Bulletproof Baldwin and kick his ass in an airplane graveyard, thus earning them the right to take on Mr Big - the multilingual banker who runs drugs for a living. Well, Bigster is just about to have them killed by his spare bulletproof guys when a helicopter shows up outside Big's office window and blasts away with the forward cannons, destroying all the windows and everything in the office, and killing the last of the bulletproof dudes. I didn't make that up. They did have $2.5 million dollars, so they hired a helicopter to blast away. And, as movie luck would have it, the helicopter pilot had no qualms about flying up to the window of a bank CEO and slaughtering everyone in his office.

Then our boys push Big out his open window, and ride off to be in a rodeo. There are no investigations of any kind. They are free to go about their business.

The one thing that keeps this movie from being as good as Roadhouse is that Roadhouse took itself seriously, and is filled with gravitas and somber declarations. I'm pretty sure the creators had no idea how bad it was. These Harley/Marlboro guys knew the movie was silly, and they hammed it up. Harley even makes cavalier jokes when their friends are slaughtered (something Patrick Swayze would never have done), although Marlboro does punch him out for doing it.

This is not just another movie so bad it is good, but rather a movie so abominable it is magnificent! Ultimately, I pay it the highest compliment a bad movie can get - it is almost as much fun as Roadhouse.

Zero stars - but a very high zero!

Tuna's comments:

A few points Scoop missed:

  • Harley leaves Texas on his bike, goes through Las Vegas, then goes over the Altamont Pass, and comes down into Burbank, California. Unfortunately, the Altamont is between Oakland and Sacramento, 400 miles north of Burbank.
  • Much of the action takes place in the Air Force boneyard at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Our boys get there by hopping a fence from the Burbank airport.
  • They jump 40 stories into the hotel pool, kicking their legs the entire way. If they had actually hit the water spread-legged as pictured, the actual fall would have given them massive chlorinated enemas and very sore testicles.
  • Although Johnson is the world's greatest shot, he isn't the world's greatest thinker. He can't figure out why he can't kill the bulletproof guys until the third shoot-out, when he finally realizes that their heads are unprotected.

 

Pamela Anderson from the book Barely Private

Tricia Helfer from the book Barely Private

Kerry Knuppe in Skills Like This

Sharon Stone in The Quick and the Dead

Film Clips