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History of Sex in Cinema: 1976 |
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Director Bud Townsend's film (with producer Bill Osco) was self-proclaimed as an "X-rated Musical" fantasy. It was one of many examples in the late 1970s of pornographic, eroticized versions of fairy tales - produced in both soft R-rated and very hard-core (XXX) versions (in the early days of cable TV and home video) to appeal to varied audiences and make more profits for the producers. The hard-core explicit version (with lots of close-ups) of Alice in Wonderland included self-masturbation, oral sex, ejaculation, lesbianism, pseudo-bestiality, and inter-racial intercourse. Other sexed-up classic fairy tales of the era included:
This version of the Alice tale (with various song-and-dance numbers) was very loosely based on Lewis Carroll's children's book of the same name. It starred cute blue-eyed blonde Kristine DeBell (who had appeared on the cover of the April 1976 Playboy) as the title character, a daydreaming virginal (prudish or frigid) librarian of a small-town. She told her interested and caring young mechanic boyfriend William (Ron Nelson): "I'm just not the girl you're looking for." He wished for her to be more sexual and demonstrative:
She picked up a book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then fell asleep. In a fantasy or dream sequence, she found herself transported to the "whole new world" of Wonderland - with an opportunity to explore pleasure and her sexuality. She drank the contents of a small bottle marked DRINK ME, was shrunk in size (her clothes naturally fell off her naked body), and entered Wonderland.
Some of the characters from the original tale that she met included:
Alice was tried before a judge for the crime of chastity (and being virginal), found guilty, and sentenced to give oral sex/'head' to the Queen. Alice was pampered by two lesbian maids in the royal court (with a bath, powder, perfumes, etc.) before meeting with the Queen to provide personal sexual services.
Afterwards, Alice escaped (with the Mad Hatter and White Rabbit) although she was pursued by the Queen and her court, and returned to her former life where she eagerly made love to her understanding boyfriend in the library. |
 Alice (Kristine DeBell)  Lewis Carroll's Book  The White Rabbit (Larry Spelman)  The Mad Hatter (Alan Novak)  The Mad Hatter Exposing Himself to Alice   Two Lesbian Nurses (Nancy Dare and Terri Hall) Strip-Dancing For Humpty Dumpty  The Queen (Juliet Graham)  Maids in the Queen's Royal Court   Alice Back With Her Boyfriend William (Ron Nelson) |
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Allegro Non Troppo (1976, It.) Director Bruno Bozzetto's irreverent spoof of Fantasia (1940) was structured similarly with six animated segments and classical music. Two of the segments were sexually-explicit with adult content:
Accompanying the musical segment, an aging, overweight, white-bearded, pink-nosed, unattractive satyr tried to make himself look younger so that he might successfully pursue and win the affections of a beautiful nubile nymph in a water-colored forest. He fantasized that he was virile and had the beautiful naked nymph in his arms. All of his efforts seemed to fail and revealed his age to the young beauties, causing him to lament. He even obsessively imagined female body parts: breasts, legs, hands, and other female shapes in the clouds, until the segment's final image revealed that he was already on "Mother" Earth (that had sprouted a pink nipple on a giant, reclining female figure).
Two fig-leaf-less, anatomically-accurate "Adam and Eve"-like individuals were created out of clay by human hands and then animated. They were accompanied by a diabolical green serpent-snake that tried to tempt them to eat a delectable apple from the tree (of knowledge, according to the Biblical tale), but the nude couple was uninterested. When the snake ate the forbidden fruit himself, he went on a nightmarish journey (the results of original sin) where he was assaulted by elements of modern society, including automobiles turning into a dragon, and giant devil characters. When cornered, the snake was bombarded with sexy TV commercials on six screens featuring nude women and closeups of breasts and nipples, and signs that read: "Only $7.99," "Free," "Sex," "WIN," "Buy," "BIG," "Crazy," "SUPER," and more. Giant pink breasts came at him from the screens, and naked blonde females with pink bodies held out their arms to him from various consumer products for sale. He was literally surrounded by dozens of competing merchandise items that caged him in from all sides. Afterwards, the snake, now fully dressed, returned to the naked Adam-Eve couple to tell them of his awful experiences, after which he removed his clothes, spit up the apple, and went on his merry way. |
 Nymph 
Satyr With Nymph   "Mother Earth" |
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Bobbie Jo and the Outlaw (1976) Director Mark Lester's low-budget crime drama was essentially an exploitation drive-in road film that featured fast-driving, high-speed souped-up cars, violence and lots of Southern good-ol'-boys. It also became notorious for lots of continuity errors, a choppy narrative, and for being one of the few (or sole) films in which the hot Lynda Carter went topless. The film paid homage to a number of other films and their iconic scenes, such as:
Burt Reynolds had already made the sub-genre commercially-viable with White Lightning (1973) and its sequel Gator (1976) - all before the popular TV show Dukes of Hazzard began in 1979. In fact, the franchise of Smokey and the Bandit films (from 1977-1983) borrowed its similar-sounding title, and the rampage of the two main 'lovers-on-the-lam' and their pursuit by the local Sheriff (in this case, Clovis New Mexico Sheriff Hicks (Gene Drew)) was from the playbook of a number of previous films, including The Getaway (1972) and Badlands (1973). The tagline of this classic film described the two title characters:
When Lyle pulled up to the car-hop with a souped-up, stolen yellow and black striped Mustang, he was mesmerized by the sight of the beautiful Bobbie Jo, who soon changed from her cowgirl uniform into high-waisted bell-bottoms and a light-blue, front-laced halter vest, and then at her home switched into a floral print top (bra-less). She was berated by her drunken and controlling widowed mother Hattie Baker (Peggy Stewart) for misbehavior. Desirous of freedom and the open road, she hopped in stalker Lyle's car sitting out front, and urged him: "Come on, lover boy, move it, or did you lose your nerve?...Just drive..." He rescued her from her predicament, and they fled together into the desert. There at some ancient pueblo ruins after she serenaded him with a guitar song (she reminded him of singer Linda Ronstadt), they made love, and the next morning were shooting beer cans for target practice.
They met up with Bobbie Joe's bespectacled hippie friend and co-worker Essie Beaumont (Belinda Balaski), and had a strange hallucinatory drug experience (with sacred mushrooms) while naked in a small body of muddy water with a white-haired Native American. Soon, they also joined up with two others in New Mexico - the beginning of their downfall:
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    Bobbie Jo (Lynda Carter) with Lyle (Marjoe Gortner)    Essie (Belinda Balaski)  
Bobbie Jo (Lynda Carter) |
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Carrie (1976) Brian DePalma's psychological horror tale was about extreme sexual repression for a gawky, awkward 'ugly duckling' teenaged girl who had been subjected to religious indoctrination by her ignorant, psychotic and fanatical mother. There were a number of sequels and remakes:
The horror film (adapted from a Stephen King novel) opened with a slow-motion credits sequence set in a locker-shower room full of naked high school girls, including popular yet abusive 'bad' girl Chris Hargensen (Nancy Allen). She was introduced as she strode completely naked from the shower, and flicked her towel at friends.
The voyeuristic scene also found another lonely student Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) enjoying the warm flow of a steamy shower - until she experienced the shock of her first menstruation (late-coming at age 17). Naively thinking she was dying when she saw blood coming out of her, she cried out "Help me!", and endured cruel teasing by other insensitive classmates. Chris Hargensen led the taunting and ridiculing of the terrified Carrie - a thoroughly humiliated, picked-upon menstruating teen. The jeering girls tossed tampons and sanitary napkins at her while they yelled: "Plug it up!" Suddenly, there was the first instance of Carrie's telekinetic power - one of the light bulbs in the ceiling burst. Carrie was protected and comforted by the PE instructor Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) from the taunting and ridiculing; Chris and some of the others were punished with a one week's detention, to perform exercises on the athletic field with Miss Collins; Chris defiantly forfeited her ticket to the prom when she told Miss Collins before stomping off: "THIS ISN'T OVER, THIS ISN'T OVER BY A LONG SHOT!" Chris (and some of her friends) spent the rest of the film setting in motion the plot to get revenge - to again humiliate Carrie at the HS prom, by dumping pig's blood on her Carrie's obsessed, religiously-fanatical and stern mother Mrs. Margaret White (Piper Laurie) interpreted tormented Carrie's onset of menstruation as a sign of her oncoming impurity and had been subjecting her, throughout her entire life, to shame-inducing words ("Help the sinning woman see the sin of her days and ways. Show her that if she had remained sinless, the curse of blood would not be on her"). She described how Carrie's period was ordained by God: "God visited Eve with the curse. And the curse was the curse of blood....And he visited Eve with the second curse. And this was the curse of childbearing." Mrs. White further warned Carrie about boys and prohibited her from going to her prom: ("Boys. Yes, boys come next. After the blood, the boys come. Like sniffing dogs...grinning and slobbering, trying to find out where the smell comes from, where the smell is. That smell!") In the much-celebrated, exhilarating prom finale sequence, the camera circled counterclockwise around Carrie and dream date Tommy (William Katt) as they moved in the opposite direction; after Carrie was set up to be crowned the high-school's prom queen, she was cruelly doused by pig's blood in a bucket from above. In her mind, she heard tauntings: "They're gonna laugh at you," and "Plug it up!", and in her view (spinning around), she imagined the prom-goers laughing and jeering at her.
Feeling humiliated, she sought psycho-kinetic, murderous revenge against the prom-goers (shown in split-screen); following her cruel teasing, she enacted a fatal and bloody aftermath of retribution with her telekinetic powers - an example of sublimated sexual rage; she massacred prom-attendees (by incineration, crushing, and electrocution). Seeking retribution, she caused the prom's exit doors to slam shut, and the lights to pop. An emergency fire hose snaked into mid-air and doused the party-goers, causing chaos, confusion, and bodies careening around the dance floor. Some were electrocuted (Mr. Fromm (Sydney Lassick)), crushed by falling rafters (Miss Collins (Betty Buckley)), trampled, or burned to death in the resulting fire.
Outside the school gym as Carrie walked home, she overturned a car attempting to hit her, driven by mean Billy Nolan (John Travolta) and Chris Hargensen, and she caused the flipped, rolled-over car to burst into flames. Upon returning home in her blood-soaked prom dress, Carrie cleansed herself in the bathtub. As she sought comfort from her mother, and they recited the Lord's Prayer together, Mrs. White reached for a gleaming butcher knife and stabbed Carrie in the back as she was hugging her. Carrie used her telekinetic powers to send a projectiles of sharp objects to pin her mother against a wooden kitchen door pillar. She murdered her ultra-religious, psychotic mother Margaret in an ecstatic crucifixion-death scene - crucified by flying cutlery and kitchenware.
In the film's shock second ending - actually a recurring nightmare - Carrie's classmate Sue Snell (Amy Irving) went to put the flowers on Carrie's grave. Suddenly Carrie's bloody hand burst out of the ground at her from beyond the grave and grabbed her arm to pull her down into hell with her - the white-clad young girl screamed and suddenly woke up while recuperating in her bed at home, still screaming hysterically and being grabbed and held by her reassuring mother (Priscilla Pointer) ("It's all right, I'm here") as she experienced more nightmares. |
   Carrie's High-School Shower Trauma During Her First Menstruation  Carrie Begging: "Help me!"  Chris: "Plug it up!"  PE Teacher Miss Collins (Betty Buckley) Comforting Carrie  Chris to Miss Collins: "This isn't over!"  Carrie with Crazed Mother Mrs. Margaret White (Piper Laurie)  At the Prom, Rotating Camera Around Carrie with Dream Date Tommy   Carrie - Cleansing Herself After the Bloody Experience at the Prom   Carrie's Punished Mother - Crucified by Knives Telekinetically Thrown at Her |
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Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976, Brazil) (aka Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) Director Bruno Barreto's NR-rated erotic comedy was a box-office smash hit - the most successful Brazilian film in history for many years.
Set in the 1940s, it told about the title character:
Her handsome wastrel husband Valdomiro 'Vadinho' Santos Guimarães (Jose Wilker), with whom she enjoyed long bouts of carnal sex, died while dancing in the street during carnival festivities. She was remarried to boring, hard-working, dull and meticulous pharmacist Dr. Teodoro Madureira (Mauro Mendonça) - unremarkable in bed when compared to her ex-husband. There were sexual complications when her ex-husband returned on his one-year death anniversary. He appeared as a ghost to make erotic and passionate love to her - and only she could hear and see him. Dona Flor relished the randy reappearances of her first husband alongside her in bed for strange threesomes. |
   Dona Flor (Sonia Braga) |
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Writer/director Nagisa Oshima's shocking and intense foreign film was about extreme, all-consuming sexual obsession, deadly madness, destruction of the servant/master dichotomy, and complete immersion. It bordered on pornography in its uncut version, and was seized and banned by US Customs and postponed in its censored release. It included an orgy scene, sexual violence, sexual games, and frequent shots of an erect penis and fellatio. This film broke the taboo in Japanese cinema against showing female pubic hair and sex organs. It caused a sensation - and lively discussion - at the Melbourne Film Festival in 1976 when first released. The film, produced in France, reflected the tradition of erotic Japanese wood-block prints, the shunga, in which the faces were stylized, but the sexual organs (especially the phallus) were shown aroused, enlarged and delineated with almost topographical detail and care. This erotic Japanese masterpiece about painful passion in 1936 Japan told the story of a torrid, increasingly intense and dangerous, true-to-life, almost non-stop sexual affair between:
After spying on Kichizo and Toku having sex, Sada developed a crush on Kichizo.
In the scenes between submissive Kichizo and a dominating Sada Abe, there were explicit shots of:
Almost penis-fixated, she innocently stated: "Isn't it natural for a woman to love the sex of the man she loves?" Eventually, when Sada grew jealous of her partner's continuing sexual relations with his wife Toku and wielded a knife at her, she also threatened to destructively cut off Kichizo's penis - an eventuality that came true. The most controversial and infamous sequence in the film was the depiction of the violent and disturbing practice of auto-erotic asphyxiation to aid their sexual excitement - first with her bare hands, and then with a red scarf. The film climaxed with his bloody genital dismemberment/castration after murderous strangulation so that she could keep his member inside of her. She also carved in his chest - in blood: "Sada Kichi the two of us forever."
Afterwards, the empowered female carried around her master-lover's severed genitals in a handkerchief for four days - an enactment of her proprietary feelings about his member - until she was arrested. |
 Sexual Touching During Menstruation   Kichizo and Sada: Intercourse   Kichizo and Sada: Oral Sex     Kichizo with Sada  Caught in the Act    Insertion of Egg - and Then Consumed |
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Director/writer Serge Gainsbourg's debut film was banned in the UK when initially released, and often accused of perversion because of an unnecessary emphasis on anal sex. It also contained an explicit reference to fellatio (in a scene of the consumption of gooey cucumbers). The English title of the film was also the title of a controversial 1967 song recorded by the director and his then-girlfriend Brigitte Bardot, unreleased until 1986. It was later re-recorded in 1969 in a more popular best-selling erotic version with Jane Birkin singing the song (and providing genuine orgasmic, breathy sexual moans and groans). The song was censored in various countries, and even the edited version in France was suppressed. The Vatican publically cited the song as offensive. In the dramatic film about a love triangle, an affair developed between:
Abandoning his own male lover Padovan, Krassky was attracted to Johnny, due to her androgynous and boyish look. She even claimed: "I have no tits and a big arse." The couple floated on a river naked with their rear-ends draped over the sides of an inner tube. They found that they had to resort to heterosexual anal intercourse (a taboo and painful sex practice) when he failed to maintain his erection during regular vaginal intercourse. Their first attempt led to masochistic Johnny's loud screams of pain, forcing the two to often be evicted before consummation. At another point in the film, Krassky gave Johnny a gift: an old stuffed children's cuddly toy rescued from the decaying trash which she later held to her chest during masturbation - symbolically pairing sex and trash. Their attempts at reaching sexual consummation, as she repeatedly offered her backside and 'played dead' were thwarted again and again in various motels/apartments, until they finally found satisfaction in the back of a garbage truck - a scene shot in arty fashion from above. The film concluded, after they both achieved sexual satisfaction, with jealous Padovan assaulting Johnny in her bath. He wrapped a transparent plastic garbage bag around her head and attempted to suffocate her, but she was saved when Krassky drove up in a garbage truck. She was incensed that Krassky wouldn't retaliate against Padovan and told him to leave. The two men left her sobbing, naked, and begging as they departed in the garbage truck parked outside. |
    Transgressive Sexuality    Johnny (Jane Birkin) |
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Director Lamont Johnson's sordid and glossy film was severely criticized for its cheap and exploitational nature. Rather than condemning rape, it was thought to exploit and sensationalize the crime and had to be drastically edited after preview audiences despised a lengthy rape-bondage sequence. The film's tagline attempted to emphasize women's empowerment: "She believed she was the weaker sex until the day she was violated. The story of a woman's outrage and a woman's revenge." It also claimed: "LIPSTICK - It isn't always an invitation to kiss." The R-rated drama told about a provocative fashion and lipstick model Chris McCormick (Margaux Hemingway in her film debut), who was the victim of an ugly, sodomizing rape. The spiteful and creepy Gordon Stuart (Chris Sarandon), the music teacher of her younger sister, was let into the apartment. Feeling rejected again, he suddenly brutalized her, threw her around her apartment, and angrily asked: "You f--k to get what you want, huh?" In her bathroom, he ordered her to put lipstick on her face ("Put it on"), forced her to look at her smeary face in a mirror, and mocked her. He asked: "Am I good enough to f--k?", and then raped her from behind as she screamed. He had tied her down to her bed with silk scarves and ran a knife blade across her body.
The rapist was brought to trial, but acquitted of the rape charges, to the dismay of prosecutor Carla Bondi (Anne Bancroft). Chris sought lethal vigilante revenge against Stuart, especially after he also went after her 15 year-old sister Kathy (Mariel Hemingway in her film debut, Margaux' real-life sister) in an abandoned office building (with his hideous assault fortunately off-screen). In the film's ending, lipsticked Chris used a pump-action shotgun to seek bloody and murderous justice (with an obviously tacked-on ending and voice-over which found Chris not guilty of the murder). |
 Chris McCormick (Margaux Hemingway)   Revenge for Rape |
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The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976, UK) Director Nicolas Roeg's impressionistic, hallucinatory, disjointed, non-literal sci-fi film and dramatic parable was a pretentious, fish-out-of-water story about an alien in an alien culture. The disorienting, enigmatic, and densely-surreal cult film about a friendly alien invasion featured a non-linear narrative (and jarring cross-cutting transitions, flashforwards and backwards, dissolves and jerky camera movements) - it became a perennial popular 'midnight movie' and was considered highly provocative, and somewhat weird and daring for its time. The allegorical movie included scenes of unusual, exploratory and explicit sexual encounters (with full frontal nudity of both major stars), cut from the film's initial UK release for US audiences. It told of the developing relationship between:
After the scene of Newton's arrival on Earth, he soon acquired wealth as a tycoon, heading up a technological firm using patents with advanced inventions from his home planet. When he revisited New Mexico where he had initially crash-landed, at the site of his soon-to-be-established, lucrative business enterprise headquarters known as World Enterprises Corporation, he met up again with Mary-Lou. Before long, Thomas moved into her apartment to live together with her, as she taught him about many human vices and distracted ways of living, including the excessive drinking of Beefeater Gin, watching multiple TV sets at the same time, attending a religious service, and humanoid sex. During their tumultuous and slightly dysfunctional relationship, they at first experienced a very tender love-making experience. At the same time, Thomas was experiencing memories/visions of his alien family (his wife and two children), at first in a green pasture, and then suffering and dying on his drought-stricken home planet.
At the same time, Thomas was being threatened by the government and rival corporations with the curtailing of his highly-successful corporation. Thomas was also preparing for his long-awaited space project and the design of a transportation infrastructure - to set up the maiden voyage of a spaceship to transport him and water back to his home planet - but it was taking longer than expected. Thomas informed Mary-Lou that he was giving her his house (built next to the lake where he crash-landed) and filling her bank account, but was leaving her; she protested: "I want to be with you"; Thomas feared he would die if he remained there ("I can't stay"). In a startling revelation sequence, when he opened his locked door to Mary-Lou, he revealed his true alien form to her (pale skin, bald-headed, cat-eyed with yellow slits, earless and hairless); she was so startled, panicked, frightened and repulsed by his genderlessness, that she uncontrollably peed down her leg at the horrific sight of him.
Thomas laid back on his bed completely unclothed, and from his POV, he envisioned his own alien or extra-terrestrial version of human sex; two aliens flipped through the air, excreting a thick, semen-like, viscuous white fluid or goo that covered their bodies; Mary-Lou removed her nightgown and hesitantly crawled over to him on the bed, tried to calm down, and tentatively touched him, but was still thoroughly repulsed by him. Soon after, Thomas departed from the house, leaving a distraught Mary-Lou to live alone there. The launch-date of the World Enterprises' spaceship to send Thomas - the head of the corporation - to a planet in space was set to launch from the NM space pad, but it was interrupted by shadowy government agents and other rival capitalist companies, who abducted him. Thomas was taken prisoner, and locked in a secluded, 8th floor level luxury apartment (inside the Hotel Plaza) by government administrators; his arrest and detention were predicated on the fact that his monopolistic corporation had destabilized the US economy.
Thomas was brutally dehumanized, and kept passive, bored, defenseless and unresistant with liberal doses of alcohol, causing him to become a crippled and addicted alcoholic over a lengthy unspecified amount of time; he continued to be a reclusive TV-viewer; his captors frequently medically tested and examined him, with special attention to performing surgery on his nipples. After several years apparently passed, Thomas' company eventually went bankrupt. An obviously-older Mary-Lou visited Thomas in captivity, who had kept up his indulgences of entertainment and alcohol; depressed and in despair, he was no longer his planet's savior, and unable to return to his doomed home; Mary-Lou had also been ravaged and corrupted by frequent drinking.
During their frenzied and loveless encounter, a drunk Newton threatened Mary-Lou with a pistol after he had dipped its barrel into a glass of wine, and then licked it and drank from the glass; both were drinking after a gluttonous feast. ("I think you know, you know too much about me... I can do anything, now, you know? I can kill you right here on this bed. Then I could phone room service. And they'd - they'd take your body away, and then I'd have them send up another girl"); as she held a banana for defense, she begged for her life: ("Oh, Tommy. Tommy. I just want it to be like it was. Me, the two of us. You. You. The way you were"); he barked back: "That's the way I am! It's too late, Mary-Lou. I can't trust you"; he stood up to shoot her: "Good-bye, Mary-Lou...Sleep well!"; he pulled the trigger and the gun fired a loud bang - and then he revealed he was only fooling her - it was a blank-firing fake gun. A mostly-loveless sexual encounter commenced, with the pop tune "Hello, Mary-Lou" playing on the soundtrack (performed by John Phillips & Mick Taylor); the two wrestled for the gun and with each other in various forms of undress, both exhibiting full-frontal views of themselves, while continuing to use the gun as sexual foreplay as they both struggled with the weapon. Afterwards, a major argument developed and destroyed their relationship forever; they reciprocally declared that they no longer loved each other: (Mary-Lou: "I don't love you anymore" - Thomas Jerome Newton: "And I don't love you"); Mary-Lou offered one final insult:
As the film was concluding, the morose Thomas had lost all of his drive, energy, and enthusiasm about returning to his alien planet and his family, and had replaced his dreams with heavy drinking of Beefeater Gin; his circumstances no longer permitted the long trip. The final views of Thomas were as a completely drained, eternally-trapped, broken, depressed and alone alcoholic, although he had remained youthful looking; he was becoming inebriated in a cafe chair on an outdoor patio. |
 Hotel Cleaning Lady Mary-Lou (Candy Clark)  Mary-Lou: "You can come in Tommy. Don't be embarrassed"  A Vision of His Family in a Green Pasture!   Thomas' Wife (also Candy Clark) and Two Children  Mary-Lou's Horrified Shock at Thomas' Revelation of His Alien Self  Reptilian or Cat-Like Yellow Eyes With Slits, Bald-Headed, Hairless, Earless  Mary-Lou Nervously Lying Next to Thomas After He Revealed Himself as an Alien  During His Kidnapping, Thomas Was Subjected to Invasive Medical Testing  Mary-Lou Reunited with Thomas After Decades      Their Playful But Loveless Sexual Encounter During Thomas' Captivity |
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Network (1976) Sidney Lumet's critical look at TV news, Network (1976), included a side story of the affair between aging married man and network news head Max Schumacher (William Holden) and icy-cold, and work-obsessed VIP of Programming Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway). During dinner at a restaurant, she related her unhappy, soul-dead personal life and sexual inadequacies, and how she passionately breathed and lived her work, television and high ratings:
During a weekend tryst in the Hamptons, without hardly pausing, she orgasmed during an intense ranting about programming challenges regarding "The Mao Tse-tung Hour":
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   Diana (Faye Dunaway) |
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Novecento (1976, It./Fr./W. Germ.) (aka 1900, or Twentieth Century) Bernardo Bertolucci's epic-length, sprawling historical drama of Fascist Italy from 1900 to the WWII era was his follow-up film, another controversial one, after Last Tango in Paris (1972). The lengthy melodrama chronicled the struggles between leftist and rightest groups, exemplified by its two main male characters with divergent social standings. The two men were both conceived on the same day at the start of the 20th century. It was greeted with both excitement and skepticism at the Cannes Film Festival for its near-pornographic scene of sexual exploration featuring big stars in an explicit sex act. The controversial scenes were edited out for the US release of the truncated film, and later reappeared in the over-5 hour, NC-17 re-release in 1991. The major scene of contention involved three characters:
Alfredo and Olmo visited Neve, where both were viewed completely naked as they got into bed with her, one on each side. Alfredo asked: "Who goes first?" She sat up between them, and then as the camera moved closer to peer over the end of the bed, it saw that she was visibly fondling and mutually masturbating both of them (one hand for each penis). Then, she considered a different approach and asked Alfredo: "Maybe you can do something better?" She grabbed Alfredo's right hand and guided it to Olmo's genitals. When he jerked away, she went back to pleasuring Alfredo. But then when she was forced to take a drink, she soon felt strange and suffered an epileptic convulsion, aborting their time together. Earlier, the two prepubescent boys examined and compared the length of their penises. Alfredo married Ada Chiostri Polan (Dominique Sanda), after taking her virginity in a barn, while Olmo married independent minded Anita Foschi (Stefania Sandrelli) - who died during childbirth. There were other violent scenes involving the disturbing and brutal Berlinghieri farm manager Attila Mellanchini (Donald Sutherland) who was later vengefully punished for his sadism. The final sequence portrayed the Italian socialist peasants overthrowing their Fascist masters - and the major true test of loyalty - would Olmo defend his life-long "padrone" friend? |
 Neve (Stefania Casini)     Neve Practicing Double-Handed Masturbation with Alfredo (Robert De Niro) and Olmo (Gerard Depardieu) |
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Writer/director Catherine Breillat's feature debut was this erotic drama with strong and shocking sexual content - it was made in 1975, but not released until 25 years later due to financial problems with Breillat's production company and controversy surrounding this sensational, raw and strange film. This film was promptly banned upon its initial release in France in 1976, and was not released to theaters until the year 2000. One tagline was:
Breillat would later become famous for the similarly-explicit Romance (1999, Fr.) and Fat Girl (2001, Fr.) which were also preoccupied with the representation of female sexuality. The self-reflective film was not considered pornographic by many, but rather a serious attempt to represent the disruptive awakening and tumultuous sexuality of the psyche of a pubescent young female, who was all too-ready to transgress taboos of society. The frank film showed various close-ups of her genitalia, her crude and realistic fascination with messy, tactile, and visceral emitted fluids (mostly from her body) and mysterious smells (including vomit, urine, a broken egg yolk, tree sap, blood from a beheaded chicken, her own ear-wax, sperm (in a fantasy sequence) and candle-wax - often shown in closeup), and also, her rampant sexual fantasies and infatuations. For example, during the female protagonist's first night at home, she flopped backwards onto her bed in her two-piece pajamas; seemingly depressed, she then vomited onto herself; she spoke in voice-over: "I sat up cautiously, liberated by the vomit's warmth, by the sweetish smell it gave off. Disgust makes me lucid. It was at that very moment that I decided to write my diary because I couldn't sleep." She recalled a night at school when she wrote out her name on a mirror with vaginal secretions, and went to a toilet stall to smoke a cigarette and urinate, while locking out her best friend Martine (Alexandra Gouveia). This original, unapologetic and bold coming-of-age film charted the budding sexuality and self-exploration of one teenager in the summer of 1963 in France:
The provocative film opened with Alice riding on a train returning home for the summer to Southwestern France (the Landes Forest area of Gascony) with her contemptuous, intolerant voice-over (voice by Marie-Hélène Breillat) and feelings of oppression:
When she arrived at her home train station, a sugar-sweet pop tune played about a young female's insecurities: "Suis-je une petite fille" (Lyrics: "I'm a little girl. I don't know, no, I don't know. How big a girl I am. Only you can tell. Please, please tell me, tell me now. Please, please tell me what you like about me"). There were a number of incidents involving her sexual awakening
However, in one surreal, graphically-explicit and shocking fantasy dream sequence involving the hired worker Jim, Alice was lying naked spread-eagled on her back on the ground - her hands were tied back with barbed wire. He dangled a live and wiggling earthworm (a symbol of a flaccid, small-sized male genitals) over her full-screen genitals, then tried to insert it into her vagina. When unsuccessful, he pulled apart the worm with his fingers into segmented pieces, and sprinkled the remains on top of her pubic hair. She looked up as he stood towering above her, and he snickered at her.
In a second imaginary fantasy sequence with Jim, she walked to the sawmill and came upon Jim urinating with his back to her ("He was shaking it"). She attracted Jim's attention by removing her panties and urinating in front of him. He walked off, again disinterested. She ran after him to the beach, and crawled in front of him (with chicken feathers protruding from her rear), as he opened his pants in front of her. She told him: "Cluck, cluck, I'm a chicken too." He grabbed one of the feathers with his teeth, and they shared a 'feather-kiss.' He placed flowers in her hair. They both rolled onto their backs and side-by-side, they masturbated next to and in front of each other. Afterwards, he wiped his sperm onto her blouse ("I watched his cock flopping like a dead fish"). She was disgusted and as she departed, she yelled out: "Get lost!"
In the film's conclusion, it was revealed that Alice's philandering father was involved in an on-going affair. Alice listened as her parents quarreled about their disintegrating marriage, although her father pledged: "I don't think I want to lose you."
As some form of ironic punishment for sneaking over to Alice's place in the dark for their "first date," Jim (who had just been fired by her father after demanding overtime) was shot and killed by a trap that Alice's father had set up to keep wild boar out of his corn field. Alice's mother reacted with hysteria: "My God, we're ruined...How are we going to pay for this?" Alice watched the crime scene from inside the house as she packed to return to school. There were a few closing or end credits followed by a black screen accompanied by music on the soundtrack. |
 Alice Touching Herself Underneath Table with Tea Spoon  Alice With Her Panties Down to Ankles in Field  Alice In Front of Her Bathroom Mirror: "I'm well-developed for my age"  Alice Vomiting Onto Herself  Alice Urinating in School Toilet Stall  With Her Girlfriend Martine at the Beach  Alice Touching Herself with Red Paste   Riding Her Bike Showing Her Panties or Bare-Assed  Her Unnatural Relationship with Her Father  Alice Imagining Seeing Her Father's Genitals  Alice Spread-Eagled and Masturbating on Railroad Tracks  Alice Buggering Herself  Alice's Cheating Father  Non-Fantasy Sex with Jim  Last Image of Alice |
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Salon Kitty (1976, It./W.Germ./Fr.) (aka Madame Kitty) Italian erotic cinema director Tinto Brass' controversial yet beautifully filmed arthouse film was another advanced example of the pre-WWII Nazi-exploitation films that had begun to appear at the end of the previous decade. It pushed the envelope, with plentiful male and female nudity, a massive orgy, masturbation, lesbianism, and other transgressive material. This historically-based allegory co-starred Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger, fresh off their appearances in another tale of Nazi licentiousness, Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969, It.). It was somewhat more extreme than Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter (1974) and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo: 128 Days of Sodom (1975), but not as exploitational or sleazy as Love Camp 7 (1969), for example. Set in the year 1939, it told about a Nazi-sympathetic brothel in Socialist-run Germany run by the title character Madame Kitty Kellermann (Ingrid Thulin). Power-questing Nazi officer Helmut Wallenberg (Helmut Berger) took over the whorehouse and stocked it with a new group of about twenty "good Nationalist girls." The commandant strolled along a line of stripped, "flawless" females to be tested, instructing them:
Another line-up of nude males joined the females, and they paired off for gymnastic-like sexual exercises - during a giant orgy.
During the procedures, Helmut's eye was attracted to blonde Margherita (Teresa Ann Savoy), and he took her as his mistress. His goal was to use Nazi intelligence to bug officers during sex with the members of Kitty's brothel harem, thereby winnowing out the loyal from those not fully committed.
However, Margherita fell instead for one of her steady customers named Hans (Bekim Fehmiu), a disillusioned Wehrmacht pilot with a conscience, who planned to defect to the Allies (leading to his torturous meathook death for treason). Helmut also found vile and deformed individuals (including a midget humpback) whom he forced blonde hooker Marika (Paola Senatore) to make love to in a barred cell, to test her tolerance for perversion and defilement. Wallenberg's frumpy wife Herta (Tina Aumont) appeared in a small role, when she was forced to participate in a lesbian scene with Margherita. |
    The Giant Orgy 
(l to r): Margherita with Herta (Tina Aumont) 
Sexual Degradation with Blonde Hooker Marika (Paola Senatore) |
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Sebastiane (1976, UK) Outspoken homosexual writer/director Derek Jarman's feature debut film was this experimental, homoerotic cult film -- rated X upon release. The film's dialogue was in vulgar Latin (and required English sub-titles). The plot was inspired by the image in a Renaissance painting of a martyred Saint Sebastian - ordered killed by Emperor Diocletian, who had him stripped naked, tied to a pole and shot through with arrows. In historical fact, Sebastian was clubbed to death and his body deposited in a Roman sewer in 288 A.D. The opening sequence was a 4th century Roman orgy in the decadent court of Diocletian. During the festivities, body-painted naked men, with comically-exaggerated giant penises danced around a savagely-painted, white-washed lead dancer (Lindsay Kemp). The main story was about Christian palace guard soldier in the Roman Imperial Troops named:
The defiant guard was sent (or exiled) to a remote Sardinian outpost camp with eight soldiers - "nowhere to go, no one to fight, nothing to do." He was shunned by the Emperor for defending a Christian accused of arson, and at the outpost, he was whipped and tied to stakes in the ground under the blazing sun. Throughout almost the entire film, the Roman soldiers at the sweltering desert outpost rough-housed, played practical jokes on each other, skinny-dipped, and engaged in various games or contests. They always appeared undressed or wearing only loincloths, and sometimes completely naked (with full-frontal male nudity). The film included an explicit and frank depiction of outdoor homosexual love-making between two of the muscular and sculpted soldiers, Anthony (Janusz Romanov) and Adrian (Ken Hicks), having same-sex intercourse in a pool of water. A relaxed indoor bath scene also revealed the genitals of a number of the soldiers, one of whom was shaving his entire naked body with a curved knife. Sebastiane rejected the final homosexual advances of his desperately-smitten, drunken, and lustful pagan commanding centurion, blonde Severus (Barney James), to engage in sodomy:
As a result, he was eventually martyred. He was tied naked to an upright stake and penetrated with arrows.
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 The Opening    Homosexuality Among Roman Soldiers  Severus (Barney James) |
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Slumber Party "57" (1976) (aka Teenage Slumber Party) Directed by William Levey, co-scripted by Levey and Frank Farmer, and produced by John Ireland, this R-rated teen sexploitational Cannon Films production came on the heels of the extremely popular American Graffiti (1973) and nostalgia for earlier times. It was not to be confused with the later film The Slumber Party Massacre (1982). Its tagline was:
The soft-core comedy-drama told about six bored and horny adolescent girls in Beverly Hills, CA in 1957 that decided to have a sleep-over at rich girl Sherry's house since her parents were away in Palm Springs for the weekend. Debbie was particularly upset because the boys' basketball team was away for the weekend. The six girls were:
First, some of the teens swam in the outdoor pool at Sherry's posh Beverly Hills mansion in the afternoon and teasingly pulled off each other's bikini tops. The frolicking girls were filmed above and below the waterline, to the tune of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire." During the evening, the six teen girls - each with an extended flashback - were challenged to tell about the initial time they lost their virginity, after Debbie suggested: "I have a super neat idea. What about if we all tell about the first time we ever did it?" Upon drawing matches, the order of story-telling was determined:
The film's predictable plot twist concluded the film - all five of the other girls in the living room confessed that they had lied and exaggerated, and were still virgins. Debbie suggested that they had to save Sherry ("We have to go stop her. We have to go tell her the truth").
They rushed upstairs to tell Sherry about their deceptions: ("Sherry! Stop! Don't do it! We were just kiddin'!"), but found Sherry already post-love-making on her bed covered with naked ballplayers - she responded "WHAT?" as the film's end credits began to appear atop excerpts from the entire film. |
 Six Girls Deciding on a Sleep-Over  Bonnie May's Flashback  Angie's Flashback   Debbie's Flashback  'Hank' (Janice Karman) Watched Smitty's Love-Making with Her Brother David  Smitty's Flashback   Jo Ann's Flashback  Sherry's Resolution to Be Deflowered |
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To the Devil a Daughter (1976, UK) This lurid Hammer Film Productions' horror film, directed by Peter Sykes, was another theatrically-released occult melodrama from the British film studio - their second-to-last film ever made (and their last official horror film). It was a respectable but weak work, trying to capitalize on and compete with the more sensational aspects of two previous films:
The film, injected with sex and violence, was very loosely based on a version of Dennis Wheatley's novel. The film's tagline stated:
The gory, violent and nasty film starred Richard Widmark as occult writer John Verney living in London, and stand-by Christopher Lee as sinister, ex-communicated, and heretical German priest Father Michael Rayner, head of the Church of Our Lord. It was one of the earliest of actress Nastassja Kinski's film appearances, which brought her continuing notoriety due to her fully-nude appearance in the film at a young age, and further charges of exploitation.
The film's disjointed plot told about a terrorized young virginal woman, Catherine Beddows (15 year-old Nastassja Kinski), raised from birth as a nun practicing in a Bavarian convent, in an order called The Children of the Lord. Her distraught father Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliott) had signed Catherine over to the care of Father Rayner, who was leading a mysterious group of Satanists who practiced black magic and held various strange rituals. In one scene, a pregnant German woman named Margaret (Isabella Telezynska) was tied by her wrists to the bedposts and held down with her legs strapped together as she went into labor - and an unseen baby burst out of her belly. Rayner wanted to release the hell-spawned force into the world through the vessel of Catherine's body via an avatar - the ultimate personification of the god Astaroth. Turning 18 years of age, Catherine would be sacrificed to revive or rebirth the world's new Anti-Christ demon ruler, by baptism in her blood. The American occult novelist Verney, who was asked by a desperate Henry (in exchange for secret occult information) to look after his daughter Catherine, found himself protecting her. The film anti-climaxed with the strange sight of the grotesque, blood-stained demonic fetal child trying to enter Catherine's womb, a Satanic orgy conducted on an altar (with a masked Rayner raping a drugged Catherine), and her abrupt saving by Verney as the film ended. |
 Demonic Child  Catherine's Altar Rape |
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Up! (1976) This surreal, graphic, and tasteless Russ Meyer film was co-written by Reinhold Timme, a pseudonym for film critic Roger Ebert. It had all the ingredients of a typical soft-core nudie-flick, including an inter-racial group of prostitutes, awful dialogue, kitschy music, bawdy humor, lots of nudity, some off-color jokes, a mostly incoherent plot, and colorful characters (including hick rednecks, a white supremacist, and an Adolph Hitler caricature). The image accompanying the poster portrayed the right side of the letter U in the film's title in the shape of an erect phallus. Throughout the film were meaningless time-frame titles, and there were even references to other classic films, such as Citizen Kane's 'Rosebud' - the small rose tattoo on the main character's lower left abdomen. It was advertised with the tagline:
The main character in the backwoods sex comedy was a buxom, Shakespeare-quoting wood-nymph (who found pleasure next to tree trunks), credited as a one-person nude "Greek Chorus" (Francesca 'Kitten' Natividad). She spoke about her role, as she nakedly straddled a large tree branch, extended her right hand, and various parts of her body were seen in huge closeup - her pubic area, and each nipple:
At various times in the film, she would appear to comment upon and identify the characters and action. In addition to the plentiful breast nudity (including lots of wild sex in the woods and many prosthetic penises a foot in length!), there was incredulous gory violence. The sketchy plot was a bizarre murder mystery, in which everyone might be a suspect. It opened with an S&M sequence performed upon depraved Hitler-like Adolph Schwartz (Edward Schaaf). The fetishist was a recluse living in a Bavarian castle in N. California (on Rt. 19 according to his mailbox). On September 19th at 9:47 am, he was enjoying numerous sexual experiences with an inter-racial group of prostitutes in his torture-dungeon. Sexual services during an orgy were being offered by representatives of various ethnic groups:
Afterwards, while taking a bath, Adolph ("the colonial oppressor") was devoured and murdered in his bathtub by a black-gloved intruder-assassin, who dumped carnivorous Harry the Nimrod (a piranha) into the bath water. Two other characters, female lovers, were introduced in the great outdoors (up against a tree), engaged in lesbian, inter-racial sex:
A third individual, a new resident in the town (Miranda, CA), was introduced:
Homer Johnson (Monte Bane), the local, sleazy Redwood County Sheriff who witnessed the murder of Margo's rapist, was rewarded by Margo with multiple bouts of sex (in and around his woodsy cabin) for falsifying his report after the killing. Often during sex, she spoke with a Mae West accent. Homer was also bribed by Gwendolyn into not writing up a warning ticket on her after he pulled her over in town, in exchange for providing him with oral sex ("I give good head") in the back seat of his patrol car. After Margo was hired to be a waitress at Alice's Cafe (while shacking up with the Sheriff), business increased due to her shapely body and friendly personality. Eventually, Paul became overly interested in her: ("I'd like to strap you on sometime") and followed her one day when she went skinny-dipping. He soon was engaged in rampant sex with her. Due to Margo's popularity, Alice soon opened a second bar-restaurant, named Alice's Cafe II. In a separate vignette, Pocohontas (Foxy Lae), a Native-American wearing a feather-bonnet, was briefly electrocuted while having sex with Sheriff Homer. She had to flee when Margo arrived for sex and found him in the shower - noting his reddish erection - with a non-PC comment: "It's all red. It looks like you've been f--kin' an Indian." In a cartoonish comedic scene in Alice's Cafe II during its grand opening, Margo entertained the customers with a strip-tease. One of the beer-drinking clients, Rafe (Bob Schott), a beserk, axe-wielding, and aggressive Paul-Bunyan-like backwoodsman giant and lumberjack, became sexually excited and animalistically raped both Margo and Alice. Sheriff Homer, who had been called to the rescue, defended them by plunging Rafe's axe into his back. Rafe removed the axe and swung it into Homer's chest, and then carried off the two females into the woods during the moonlit night. Homer pursued Rafe with a McCulloch chainsaw, and both suffered bloody deaths as they fell off a cliff. As a result, the film's two bisexuals, Margo and Alice, confronted each other at the deceased Sheriff's cabin. Alice pursued Margo with a knife and chased after her into the woods, where both became naked. Each of them cast off threats and plot explanations. In the plot-twisting ending, there were two revelations:
Alice also claimed that Schwartz was her father:
Then, in an about face, Alice proposed making love to Margo with one of Gwendolyn's foot-long dildos, stored in a violin case. Suddenly Paul appeared, threatened with a gun and shot at Alice, rationalizing: "Because you fiendishly murdered Mr. Schwartz." His gun-shot deflected off the giant dildo. When Margo was also threatened, she threw the dildo at Paul and struck his hand holding the gun.
In Epilogue # 1, both Alice and Paul were subsequently arrested and Margo received praise from her lascivious Police Commissioner (Ray Reinhardt). He secretly urged her: "Meet me at the Palace Bar, 8:15." In Epilogue # 2, the "Greek Chorus" orgasmically relived some of the highlights of the film, with excerpts. Epilogue # 3 was titled: "A Sanitarium 'Somewhere in Bavaria'" where Adolph's mailbox fell from its wooden perch. |
 Gwendolyn (Linda Sue Ragsdale) Using Tongue on Sweet Li'l Alice  Gwendolyn With a Huge Strapped-On Dildo  Alice (Janet Wood)  Margo (Raven De La Croix) in Truck with Leonard Box  Margo's Rape by Leonard Box  The Rapist's Murder   Margo with Sleazy Officer Homer  Margo's "Rosebud" Tattoo    African-American Truck Driver Gwendolyn With Sheriff Homer  Alice's Love-Making with Paul  Paul with Margo  Axe Plunged into Sheriff Homer's Chest by Rafe - But He Survived!    Sweet Li'l Alice Confronting Margo in Film's Ending |
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Alice
in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976)
