Ah, the wonderful world of exploitation. After studios and filmmakers such as AIP and Roger Corman began to make hip motion pictures aimed solely at the adolescent crowd in the ’50s – manufactured, no doubt, in an effort to wrangle the teens into theaters so as to curb the ever-growing numbers of juvenile delinquent crimes that were on the rise in the U.S. ([/sarcasm]) – the rest of the moviemaking community started to stoop so low as to embrace earnings over eminence. Some of these fine folks, however, grossly overestimated the demand to make things far en vogue with the younger generation – and chose to make their exploitative entries to cinema as wacky and as off-beat as possible.
Sometimes, it worked – and I refer you to just about any of the Beach Party films if you’re in need of something concrete to form a basis of opinion on. Or Help! with the Beatles. Heck, even Head with the Monkees will suffice.
And then there’s Sex Kittens Go to College – a movie that is almost comparable to having a freshly sliced hunk from an excruciatingly rotten potato shoved directly into your nasal passages by a mischievous monkey.
Said monkey (pronounced like Inspector Clouseau would say it, just for shits and giggles) is part of the motley cast of cretins and various people who should know better here, even – but its busty B-Movie queen Mamie Van Doren who gets top billing in this Albert Zugsmith shitfest as a highly-intelligent ex-stripper-cum-professor (with thirteen degrees) who gets chosen as the new department head of Collins College by campus robot Thinko (portrayed by one-time Westinghouse publicity gimmick, Elektro the Robot). Of course, no one can fathom such a gorgeous curvaceous creature can have brains, to boot, and the usual war of the sexes bullshit we’ve seen a thousand times before comes into play. But in the case of Sex Kittens Go to College, the film simply cannot even take such a thing as sexism seriously.
Case in point: the gurus of the Warner Archive have opted to give us the International Extended Version of this particular travesty – wherein the entire motion picture takes a break near the climax of the production to give its oversexed male patrons a climax of their own. During one scene, Thinko experiences a dream sequence wherein he and his chimpanzee companion bear witness to four different strippers (none of whom are credited, or probably known anymore) performing their regular routines without the aid of pasties. Yup, you read it right: boobies, kiddes. Of course, anyone who has suffered the horrors of Ed Wood’s Orgy of the Dead knows full well that bare breasts and g-stringed buttocks does not a movie make. While it’s safe to say this previously-unseen (in your average American cinema, that is) segment of the film is about the only worthwhile bit in the title, it’s not enough to provoke a reaction other than to scream at the top of your lungs: “Oh, dear God, please make it stop!”
Tuesday Weld and Mijanou Bardot (Brigitte’s lesser-known younger sister) star as two coed temptresses, Mickey Shaughnessy and Allan Drake are gangsters hoping to expoit Thinko’s brain, while Louis Nye, Pamela Mason, and John Carradine are college professors who make fools of themselves during this mess. Route 66 star Martin Milner is on-hand to portray Mamie’s love interest, Woo Woo Grabowski and Conway Twitty appears as themselves (the latter croons the asinine theme song, “Sexpot Goes to College” – the film’s original shooting title), and former Ed Wood actress Vampira makes an appearance sans her famous makeup. But the Exalted Decoration of Shame hands down goes to Jackie “Uncle Fester” Coogan as a loudmouthed Texan millionaire chauvinist pig who chomps both cigar and scenery whilst doing a terrible W.C. Fields impersonation.
Honestly, the only performers who emerge from this fiasco that retained even a shred of dignity are Harold Lloyd Jr. and Charles Chaplin Jr. – who appear, respectively, as a policeman and fire chief in cameos. And the only reason they walk out of the project unabashed are because they never had any careers to begin with anyway – but at least they had the common decency to not try to ride on their famous fathers’ tailcoats.
Sex Kittens Go to College is presented by the Warner Archive Collection in its intended matted widescreen ratio, and I must confess the audio/video aspects of this turkey are far above what the title really truly honestly deserves. That said, I know some of you sick bastards will seek it out despite my adamant warning, so I wish you all luck.
