Written by Chad Derdowski
Too young to care and too fast to catch, the smallest thing about Six Pack Annie is the town she came from. At least, that’s what the advertisements for this hicksploitation classic touted when it was released in 1975. Featuring Lindsay Bloom as the titular heroine, a pop-top princess with a recyclable can, Six Pack Annie is a film filled with fast trucks, even faster women, and too many amazing taglines for me to possibly work into the first paragraph of this review. But I gave it my best shot.
Also giving it her best shot is Annie Bodine, a buxom young lass of the Southern variety who has run into a bit of a pickle. You see, Annie’s Aunt Tess owns a diner and despite the steady stream of “Southern Gentlemen” who frequent the restaurant, hoping for the opportunity to ogle Annie and her friend Mary Lou, the bistro has fallen on hard times. Aunt Tess owes exactly $5,641.87 to the bank and she’s only got seven days to pay it back. Rather than see her beloved aunt’s dream die, Annie takes it upon herself to find a Sugar Daddy who can support them. And thus begins the epic tale of Six Pack Annie, a film snubbed at the Academy Awards for reasons that had to be purely political in their motivation.
So maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. But if you’re the type that enjoys Hee Haw, Smokey & the Bandit, and The Dukes of Hazzard, you might find a lot more to like about this film than any pretentious group of film critics ever did. In fact, why don’t you go ahead and watch the opening scene?
See what I’m talking about? I don’t even need to write a review; you know by the 20-second mark whether or not you want to watch this movie. The song is catchy and the jokes are corny. What more could you possibly want in a feature length film?
And if corny jokes and bad puns are what you’re looking for, you’re in luck: Six Pack Annie is filled with them. There are more double entendres in the 88 minutes of this film than in the entire eight-year run of Three’s Company, as well as a series of vaudevillian attempts at humor throughout. In all honesty, Six Pack Annie isn’t so much a film as it is a series of bad jokes and terrible skits somehow strung together by blatant plugs for Miller High Life and milky white breasts precariously held in place by skimpy tie-front tops.
Despite this abundance of jiggling bosoms, short shorts, skinny dipping, sexual innuendo, and euphemisms, there was an almost shocking absence of nudity or sexual acts depicted in the film. As a matter of fact, the movie actually seemed downright tame compared to the Southern-Fried Sodom and Gomorrah I had envisioned upon my initial perusal of the DVD package. Perhaps I’d been desensitized by the teen sex romps of my youth and the scantily clad ladies who frequent the shopping malls of the modern era in which we live or maybe I was simply fooled by the tantalizing taglines that accompanied the film, but Six Pack Annie wasn’t quite as wild and wooly as I thought it might be. Which isn’t to say that it isn’t at least a little bit wild and a whole lot wooly; it just wasn’t the veritable warehouse of masturbatory material one might expect, unless one enjoys pleasuring oneself while listening to wizened old men recite blue humor that hasn’t been funny since 1938. While this lack of exposed flesh may be disappointing to some, the good news is that you can watch it with your kids, as long as you’re cool with a little sideboob and a bit of bad language now and again. Because this is totally the kind of movie you watch with your kids, right?
I’m not going to lie to you, folks: if you’re reading this review and you are unfamiliar with this movie or others like it, there’s a good chance you won’t enjoy it. But if you are like me and appreciate what Wikipedia refers to as “a genre of exploitation film relying on stereotypical depictions of rural whites of the American South”, you’ll definitely dig Six Pack Annie. And if you’re still unsure, I’ll just suggest you look at that opening scene and listen to that awesome song because…god damn. Do I really need to explain? You were going to watch it again anyway. I just made it easier for you.
Six Pack Annie is available through MGM’s Limited Edition Collection, which means you have to order it directly from them and can’t find it at any store. There are no extras on this disc, but the picture and sound quality have been reproduced quite nicely, with only a few minor scratches.
