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Post by continosbuckle on Dec 9, 2011 0:40:12 GMT -5
In a moment of "MST3k teaches you things", I learned that Arthur Nelson (aka Vic Savage), our auteur behind Creeping Terror probably had a fetish called Vorephilia, which manifested itself in his movie by him having constant shots of women being eaten head first by said Creeping Terror. He had one token man eaten in the entire movie, but that hardly balanced out the loving attention he showed toward women being sucked down the Terror's hole/mouth/thing.
And when I was watching The Sinister Urge, I couldn't help but notice how Ed Wood very unsubtly jammed in a scene of a crossdressing policeman (and based on this and how he did it in Glen or Glenda, maybe he had a thing for blocky grandmothers as well), and pretty much everyone is aware of how that's his particular fetish.
So it got me wondering, just how many movies in the MST3k canon featured scenes where the director shoehorned in his special kink or fetish? There's of course the bizarre shaving scene in Eegah, where Robert I. Miller somehow decided to bring his shaving gear on his excursion into the Mojave but forgot food and water. And similarly, there was the genuinely odd moment in Manos: The Hands of Fate where Torgo tries to fondle Margaret's hair.
What other movies tried toying with our sexual nightmares?
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Post by KyrieEleison on Dec 9, 2011 2:11:06 GMT -5
Don't forget little Debbie as one of the Master's wives at the end of Manos. I'm really hoping that wasn't one of Hal Warren's fetishes...
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Post by continosbuckle on Dec 9, 2011 2:18:54 GMT -5
Don't forget little Debbie as one of the Master's wives at the end of Manos. I'm really hoping that wasn't one of Hal Warren's fetishes... You and me both. I figure that Hal felt he needed to resolve the issue of what was going to be done with Debbie since the argument about whether to kill her took up most of Act 2 and that fate was the only thing he could come up with. Perhaps he didn't realize how that came across as pedophilia, but it was either that or child murder, and he decided that making her the Master's wife was preferable to the suggestion that she had been killed. |
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Dec 9, 2011 14:25:33 GMT -5
Francis Coleman's fetish was clearly skydiving. Oh, and strangling women. That too.
Tor want to make it with you!
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Post by continosbuckle on Dec 11, 2011 1:21:38 GMT -5
Francis Coleman's fetish was clearly skydiving. Oh, and strangling women. That too. Tor want to make it with you! No no no. It was gunning people down from aircraft. There was the dance sequence in Skydivers that could lead you to believe that he had a thing for exceptionally tall, buxom women, but my impression was that that was inserted for its humor value more than its kink/fetish value. The woman later in a tutu on her roller skates is a little more ambiguous. Actually, one of the things that doesn't get noticed about Skydivers (and it's a shame) is how progressive it is. Beth was an equal partner with her husband in the skydiving business, and she drove around by herself in an open top jeep picking up the skydivers. Nearly fifty years later, this may not seem like much, but it was really quite audacious at the time. After all, this was a few years before James Bond used a woman opening a car door for herself as a revealing plot point. Plus, in the second Jimmy Bryant dance sequence, the woman he focused on most readily for her sexiness was a black woman in a bikini. How many movies made before 1965 even showed black women in bikinis, much less with the intention of it appealing to the audience's more prurient interests? Skydivers was released one year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Tony Zarindast, women thrashing about in mud. Maybe. |
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 11, 2011 10:57:35 GMT -5
Francis Coleman's fetish was clearly skydiving. Oh, and strangling women. That too. Tor want to make it with you! No no no. It was gunning people down from aircraft. There was the dance sequence in Skydivers that could lead you to believe that he had a thing for exceptionally tall, buxom women, but my impression was that that was inserted for its humor value more than its kink/fetish value. The woman later in a tutu on her roller skates is a little more ambiguous. Actually, one of the things that doesn't get noticed about Skydivers (and it's a shame) is how progressive it is. Beth was an equal partner with her husband in the skydiving business, and she drove around by herself in an open top jeep picking up the skydivers. Nearly fifty years later, this may not seem like much, but it was really quite audacious at the time. After all, this was a few years before James Bond used a woman opening a car door for herself as a revealing plot point. Plus, in the second Jimmy Bryant dance sequence, the woman he focused on most readily for her sexiness was a black woman in a bikini. How many movies made before 1965 even showed black women in bikinis, much less with the intention of it appealing to the audience's more prurient interests? Skydivers was released one year before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Tony Zarindast, women thrashing about in mud. Maybe. Coleman was also obsessed with coffee. I doubt coffee & shooting people from light aircraft could have a sexual fetish context.......but some people are weird. Not MST3K but Russ Meyer had a thing for ladies with copious mammary glands. A MST3K-riffed film, WWoBW had a huge focus on the female backside. No boob action, no leg action, just non-stop shots on girly butt wiggling. This is also true to a lesser extent in WILD REBELS ('Ronald McDonald, shaking his McBooty'...'Would you like some pants with that belt?'). Apparently everybody in the 1960's were proto-Sir Mix-A-Lots, which makes you wonder how Twiggy could've possibly have been such a hit. |
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Post by mrsphyllistorgo on Dec 11, 2011 13:49:15 GMT -5
Twiggy was a hit precisely because she was new and different, especially in America. The sixties style revolution in London had already displaced the rounded, voluptuous pinup girl with the slender "mod" several years before she appeared on the scene, but it took time to diffuse across the pond and into America, where it blended with the newly emerging "hippie" aesthetic for the lean, sleek look that emerged in California.
(A great book on the subject is Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy.)
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 11, 2011 19:02:15 GMT -5
Twiggy was a hit precisely because she was new and different, especially in America. The sixties style revolution in London had already displaced the rounded, voluptuous pinup girl with the slender "mod" several years before she appeared on the scene, but it took time to diffuse across the pond and into America, where it blended with the newly emerging "hippie" aesthetic for the lean, sleek look that emerged in California. (A great book on the subject is Ready, Steady, Go! by Shawn Levy.) Frankly, the voluptuous curve-o-rama ladies beat out the Twiggy-chicks by a long shot. Twiggy was a cute girl but she was built like a twelve-year-old boy! Why would guys get hot & bothered over 12 year olds & not real women. Apparently, it seems big-time fashion designers (mostly guys) are secret members of NAMBLA! Total pedastrist freaks! There's no other explaination! Hugging a skinny girl is like hugging a skeleton! You're afraid to crush her. Women are BY NATURE curvy! Women, being female, have hips & big butts in which to better bear young & boobs to feed them with! 30 year old Barbara & 12 year old Brad ARE TWO DIFFERENT THINGS! Really, this Twiggy fetish has caused an epidemic of eating disorders! Sometimes I think that the "Twiggy" look, like "Roughies" & other, more brutal "Sexplotation" flicks, are simply the creative flatulence of bitter little boy-men threatened by the Women's Movement! WOMAN: "I'm not just here to cook, clean, put out & tend kids...I can be a cop, scientist, etc., too!" MAN-BOY: "BAAWWWWWW! I'm gonna force you to be a 12 year old boy & crank out B-horror flicks with sexualized ultraviolence against helpless females for kicks!" Heck, even strong yet evil villanesses in these films dole out the worst, most explicit abuse towards women. Ilsa The She-Wolf of the SS, while she does do bad stuff to men, mainly focuses her evil on women (granted, she is losely based on an evil Nazi gal to did that sort of stuff to women, but still). Women in Prison flicks even have evil female wardens. There's not Ilsa types to torture cute guys or "Men In Prison" schlock with evil female wardens (the later wouldn't be too believeable, anyway). I'm getting away from the subject, but I think I've made my point. |
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 12, 2011 14:01:15 GMT -5
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Post by TheNewMads on Dec 12, 2011 17:19:38 GMT -5
Coleman was also obsessed with coffee. I doubt coffee & shooting people from light aircraft could have a sexual fetish context.......but some people are weird. i've got the coffee and cigarette obsession with francis as some arty beatnik thing, not a sexual kick. something about his movies is really very sexless. all the women are plain, dusty, downtrodden and broken, and all the men are haggard, exhausted, indifferent, depressed and... well, dusty, downtrodden and broken. the musical number in "skydivers" is the closest thing to sexy Francis ever gets, and it just feels so forced. I just think Francis was too depressed to ever experience sexual desire of any kind. but i'm totally speculating. A MST3K-riffed film, WWoBW had a huge focus on the female backside. No boob action, no leg action, just non-stop shots on girly butt wiggling. I'll go you a step further: to me it seems pretty obvious jerry warren had a hypnosis/mind control fetish. It's a theme throughout Wild World of Batwoman, with the woman being hypnotized into perpetually dancing, etc., but if you see another movie he did called "Teenage Zombies" (which is definitely a fun flick in an MST3k kind of way) it happens again, and it's always the sexy babes who get hypnotized. I think at one point a guy gets hypnotized for a second but then he gets shot a second later. In fact, I think Jerry Warren is probably the most perviest of all the MST3k directors with the possible exception of Ray Dennis. (That said, he was also by all accounts a perfectly nice guy and in fact was instrumental in getting the first ever female cinematographer started in the movie business, so it's hard to claim he was a misogynist or a closet rapist or anything like that. He was just real hot for hypnotized women. so sue him!  ) |
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Post by TheNewMads on Dec 12, 2011 17:41:44 GMT -5
as for "nudie-roughies" being expressions of bitter men threatened by the feminist movement, i think there might be something to that but i'm not sure you don't see more patriarchal backlash in the spy movies and TV shows of around the same time. (I was just watching "I Spy" over the weekend, for instance, which is about the most horrendously sexist thing I've ever seen, it was going on at about the same time the nudie-roughies were taking off.)
The thing with the nudie_roughies is, for one thing they were taking a huge cue from "Psycho" and "In Cold Blood," where after those two movies it became hip to make a movie where the killer or killers were the protagonist. But that didn't mean the movie liked the protagonists (surely no one sees the massacre in "In Cold Blood" and sides with the killers over the family!), just that it was popular in movies to challenge people's sensibilities by giving us movies from unsavory points of view, or movies where law enforcement was absent or ineffective and there really weren't any good guys. it hadn't been too long since movies and television were censored so that crime never paid and criminals were always caught. This had the unexpected consequence of making movies/TV where crime DID pay seem less censored and more honest, whether or not they actually were.
and these were pretty bitter times: Vietnam was going %#@%ty, there was unrest in the streets, regular family-guy conservative men i think DID feel put on and anxious, but from the few nudie-roughies i've seen they were more afraid of the creepy guys in the nudie-roughies than that they wanted to do what the creepy guys were doing. the antiheroes in nudie-roughies are almost always dissolute young punks out looking for "kicks" a la "kitten w/ a whip" ("The Defilers" is like that, and for the time it's pretty shocking stuff.) Either that or shell-shocked 'Nam vets -- the most misogynist nudie-roughie i've seen, "Don't Answer the Phone," centers around a psychotic 'Nam vet who can't adjust to civilian life, etc., etc. The movie doesn't show him as a hero by any means, but its rape-murder scenes are abysmal to watch nonetheless.
Anyway, my point i think is that the folks who made these nudie-roughies were probably a lot more sympathetic to the middle-American family-oriented characters being victimized than the debauched protagonists doing the victimizing in their films. (KwaW isn't a roughie per se but it has a lot of the characteristics of one, and it's pretty obvious we're meant to be on the old guy's side in that, even if the miscreant youths are occasionally given a flash of humanity.) It was a bit of a perpetuation of the ongoing smear of the hippy generation by their elders that went on in the 60s -- that they were dirty, degenerate, amoral, perverse, sexually profligate, etc. i'm sure some of the makers of the nudie-roughies were just doing it to get their jollies but i think less than one might suspect... mostly i think it was a combination of, look at these filthy degenerates! aren't they horrible!? See what happens when you stray from the straight and narrow?
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 12, 2011 19:05:56 GMT -5
as for "nudie-roughies" being expressions of bitter men threatened by the feminist movement, i think there might be something to that but i'm not sure you don't see more patriarchal backlash in the spy movies and TV shows of around the same time. (I was just watching "I Spy" over the weekend, for instance, which is about the most horrendously sexist thing I've ever seen, it was going on at about the same time the nudie-roughies were taking off.) The thing with the nudie_roughies is, for one thing they were taking a huge cue from "Psycho" and "In Cold Blood," where after those two movies it became hip to make a movie where the killer or killers were the protagonist. But that didn't mean the movie liked the protagonists (surely no one sees the massacre in "In Cold Blood" and sides with the killers over the family!), just that it was popular in movies to challenge people's sensibilities by giving us movies from unsavory points of view, or movies where law enforcement was absent or ineffective and there really weren't any good guys. it hadn't been too long since movies and television were censored so that crime never paid and criminals were always caught. This had the unexpected consequence of making movies/TV where crime DID pay seem less censored and more honest, whether or not they actually were. and these were pretty bitter times: Vietnam was going %#@%ty, there was unrest in the streets, regular family-guy conservative men i think DID feel put on and anxious, but from the few nudie-roughies i've seen they were more afraid of the creepy guys in the nudie-roughies than that they wanted to do what the creepy guys were doing. the antiheroes in nudie-roughies are almost always dissolute young punks out looking for "kicks" a la "kitten w/ a whip" ("The Defilers" is like that, and for the time it's pretty shocking stuff.) Either that or shell-shocked 'Nam vets -- the most misogynist nudie-roughie i've seen, "Don't Answer the Phone," centers around a psychotic 'Nam vet who can't adjust to civilian life, etc., etc. The movie doesn't show him as a hero by any means, but its rape-murder scenes are abysmal to watch nonetheless. Anyway, my point i think is that the folks who made these nudie-roughies were probably a lot more sympathetic to the middle-American family-oriented characters being victimized than the debauched protagonists doing the victimizing in their films. (KwaW isn't a roughie per se but it has a lot of the characteristics of one, and it's pretty obvious we're meant to be on the old guy's side in that, even if the miscreant youths are occasionally given a flash of humanity.) It was a bit of a perpetuation of the ongoing smear of the hippy generation by their elders that went on in the 60s -- that they were dirty, degenerate, amoral, perverse, sexually profligate, etc. i'm sure some of the makers of the nudie-roughies were just doing it to get their jollies but i think less than one might suspect... mostly i think it was a combination of, look at these filthy degenerates! aren't they horrible!? See what happens when you stray from the straight and narrow? That's a good point. I guess the big glut of sexism, violence, downer endings & nihilism in the 60's & 70's was a combo of things: 1.) The Hay's Code is kaput, let's see what we can get away with! 2.) I'm a threatened old fashioned male & change scares me! 3.) Look at these Hippie/Biker/Mod/Beatnik weirdos & how hell-spawned they are! Watch our cinematic propaganda! 4.) Silly hippie...Idealism is for kids! Now for MAJOR CYNIC THEATER 3000! Ha! Ha! Life's crap then you croak! Hobbes was right! 5.) Sometimes real life doesn't have happy endings or come in a neat package....all that's right with the world has been shown to death, for the sake of balance, here's the other side of things. 6.) VIETNAM! RIOTS! CHAOS! I NEED CATHARASIS CUZ I'M THE GUY CRANKING OUT THIS THING! 7.) True Art Is Angsty....cuz I'm pretentous, that way! 8.) There's no sense in fighting Misogyny cuz the scums will turn you into a robot! There's no sense in fighting The Man cuz he'll mow down your rebellion of Old West dwarves & deformed people, turn you into Soilent Green or make you Love Big Brother (though the latter was writen by Orwell decades before)! There's no sense in embracing hippy peacenik thinking cuz Jim-Bob will shoot you from a passing truck or four weirdos will rape & murder you and your friend (and your parents will stoop to their level to make things right)! Don't bother with the Martin Luther King Approach when a Bigot & his Latin & Asian friends terrorize your family...go all out Black Panther on them! I understand the importance of darkness & "stark realism" but I disagree with the Pro-Hyper-Cynicism, Nihilism & Pessimism of a lot of stories. Dark needs Light. The world's messy enough, why promote more? THINK BIG! Realism is fine but Idealism is great! You need both. Call me old-fashioned but I feel a story should be either a Happy Ending or a Bittersweet one. You can still have some doom & gloom but the silver lining, the "Light at the End of the Tunnel" needs to be always acknowledged. Stories that say "You can't 'Fight The Power' or change human nature", like people who think that way, are lazy bums who can't think big & gave up! Like the Peacenik Hippie who turns into Gordon Gekko. True, radical change wont happen overnight. Take baby steps, be realistic, be pragmatic. Rome wasn't built in a day so don't expect Utopia to arrive overnight! Otherwise you end up with disappointment & more oppressive regimes. That was the Hippie's downfall. Being a Hippie is great & the mindset & aesthetic need to return BUT you need to be a realist & use The System to change The System. Some of these movies do make a point but they neglect any middle ground. Take "Dirty Harry" for example. The Law is so soft on crime that evil killer rapist weirdos get a slap on the wrist. Rather than take the middle road of being tough on the hard ones while more lenient on the less serious (rehabing & counseling the later, maybe provide job training), you go tough all the way....TAKE NO PRISONERS! MIGHT IS RIGHT! *AWOOOGAAH*! Ironicly, Radical Change comes via Gradual & Moderate means! The "Middle Way" is the most "Radical" way. I don't put to much stock in "Left/Right/Center", rather I believe in "Progressive & Regressive" both can involve any part of the political spectrum. I find The Weather Underground & The Christian Coalition equally Regressive. Both Ayers & the late Fallwell can eat my shorts! Things come in many layers & shades of grey. One needs to free their mind, think big, acknowledge the bad but work towards the good, thus ends my philiosophical screed. Thank you. ;D Now for a change of pace.....   Tomatoes...It's What I'm Wearing....Tonight!  |
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Post by continosbuckle on Dec 13, 2011 1:13:11 GMT -5
Coleman was also obsessed with coffee. I doubt coffee & shooting people from light aircraft could have a sexual fetish context.......but some people are weird. i've got the coffee and cigarette obsession with francis as some arty beatnik thing, not a sexual kick. something about his movies is really very sexless. all the women are plain, dusty, downtrodden and broken, and all the men are haggard, exhausted, indifferent, depressed and... well, dusty, downtrodden and broken. the musical number in "skydivers" is the closest thing to sexy Francis ever gets, and it just feels so forced. I just think Francis was too depressed to ever experience sexual desire of any kind. but i'm totally speculating. I really don't think the coffee and/or cigarettes thing was anything with Coleman Francis. It was just a perceived need to give his sitting-around-doing-nothing actors something to do with their hands combined with his total lack of creativity. So when he's got the most uninspired scene setup of two guys sitting across from one another speaking, he spices it up by having them drinking coffee, or smoking. Obviously, he's not a tea man. The weird thing is that Beast of Yucca Flats has two cases of near or implied necrophilia. There's the initial contextless scene of the woman coming out of the shower, and there's the scene where Tor has that poor she-could-not-possibly-have-been-paid-enough-for-this actress outside the cave and starts pawing her hair. The latter, however, is almost an exact copy of a scene from The Unearthly, where Tor strokes the soon-to-be-jerked woman's hair as she lies unconscious. So maybe that was a Tor thing. Neither seems to be an attempt to titillate the audience, (or the filmmaker) however. They just don't seem like the other examples, although that could be a result of Coleman's shortcomings. I will say that the uncut version of Skydivers was a little more lighthearted than the version MST3k showed in their episode. So while I agree that Coleman probably had no use for sexiness or levity in his films, they may not have been completely absent. |
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Post by msmystie3000 on Dec 13, 2011 7:50:29 GMT -5
STARFIGHTERS seems to be almost solely made up of non-stop mid-air plane refueling.....make of that what you will.....
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Post by cityofvoltz on Dec 14, 2011 23:56:25 GMT -5
i've got the coffee and cigarette obsession with francis as some arty beatnik thing, not a sexual kick. something about his movies is really very sexless. all the women are plain, dusty, downtrodden and broken, and all the men are haggard, exhausted, indifferent, depressed and... well, dusty, downtrodden and broken. the musical number in "skydivers" is the closest thing to sexy Francis ever gets, and it just feels so forced. I just think Francis was too depressed to ever experience sexual desire of any kind. but i'm totally speculating. just a brief note- in the uncut version of red zone cuba- colemans character rapes the piano playing blind girl from the restaurant they get.... wait for it... coffee at. Its nothing like said scene from sidehackers- theres more of a struggle- and they both fall on the bed and the scene fades. I too had previously noted the dancing black Chick in skydivers being the focus of that scene and was a bit curious as to why myself- given the time it was made etc. |
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YUMMY! 
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