What Was Lost
Once the dust and madness of my early 20’s settled into the humdrum of workaday life, I looked back on the twisted avenue of my pathetic childhood and realized that certain elements from my personal pop-culture had been left behind. I began to seek these things, to recreate these particular episodes of childhood, to own them again and put them on a shelf: Movies, TV shows, short films and snippets used as filler in the days when cable networks were just a breath away from being weird-ass local UHF channels.
Rapidly, the DVD revolution brought much of it to my doorstep. Planet of the Apes: The Series and Space: 1999 were my first big successes, lovingly placed on a shelf after spending hours of my adult life having a booze-addled nostalgia fest. There are still missing shows even further behind the curtain of lost culture – I’m looking now for Voyagers! and Misfits of Science — but I’ve ended my search for those series with the knowledge that they, too, will soon be released. There’s no doubt in my heart that everything will soon be on disc or otherwise attainable through the mighty fist of bittorent. The quest to recover these shows has prematurely expired and turned into a simple waiting game.
Some things, though, have been strangely elusive. For years, they existed only on dusty VHS tapes, or even Betamax, deep in the basement of the family home. Unearthed, as with all memories, only to make way for the major changes that rock a family, or a life. Or a central air conditioning system. Or missing cats. Actually, I think a lot more happens in the crawlspace than elsewhere in the house.
These last, difficult to locate elements of my youth become increasingly desirable as I spiral into permanent bachelorhood. Some of them sit on the EBay shelves, sure, waiting for some poor sap to spend money on a retired rental cassette from the late 80’s. I’m not settling for that. I have sold both mind and soul to 21st Century America and I fucking expect everything I desire to come to me cheaply and in modern format. Also, I don’t know where my VCR is. It’s probably out in the garden shed, but we don’t go out there. Not since…the incident.
These final missing links are: The softcore flick Young Lady Chatterley starring Harlee McBride, and the sequel with Adam West; Michael Pataki’s softcore version of Cinderella with Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith; a 15 minute animation sequence set to Ravel’s Bolero that, until recently, was unnamed; a short lived Britcom series titled Phil & Arthur Go Off.
I take you now to the blossoming of my masturbation years. That magical time where explorations of my body finally paid off. The sticky, violent explosion of mind-warping freak-out followed by the immediate quest for something better than Dana Plato on Diff’rent Strokes. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Cinemax and their Saturday nights, polluted with softcore cinema rolling across the screen in your darkened room. Popularly known as “Skinemax.” Upstairs, my mother could always be relied upon to drink herself into an early oblivion, sprawled on the floor, lights out until the wicked sunrise. Downstairs, on a moldy couch, with the door closed, the glow of the TV the only light, the sound down down, Cinemax fulfilled my every early adolescent need. Emmanuel went everywhere, slave girls danced, badly dubbed Italian movies featured round-assed Amazonian women getting railed in public places. Nothing, though, could match 1977’s Cinderella. First of my favorites, it’s the musical comedy where a homosexual, cross-dressing, black fairy godmother grants Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith (70’s z-grade queen and drug-addled freak) a “snapping pussy” in order to win the heart of the bored prince who can’t cum. Between molesting young farm girls (one of whom is a staggeringly beautiful redhead) and being raped by corn cobs (which produce popcorn thanks to the heat of Cinderella’s pussy), the movie is filled with extravagant – and very well done — song and dance numbers. With laugh out loud lyrics, zany comedy routines, lots of sex, and a rare island (for the 70’s) of hot women, Cinderella still delivers for me, even after almost two decades of wall to wall anal-gaping, cum swapping, gonzo porn.
Michal Pataki is at the helm. He’s a major character actor on TV, but hasn’t directed much else. It’s a shame, too, because the man’s a genius. Sex, rape, music, dance, high brow comedy, self mockery…? Cinderella isn’t just a skin flick, it’s a strangely capable and enjoyable entry into the b-movie culture. If Pataki were doing this shit today, he’d easily develop a wild cult following. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to do that shit today. Ashes mixed with butter…spreading it slowly over Cheryl Smith’s breasts… Ah! It’s a masturbatory epic that you can watch from start to finish as a proper film. Try that with Emmanuel In Space!
Next on the list is one of the recently found on DVD: Young Lady Chatterley. Also out of 1977, the tired old story is twisted into an unrecognizable softporn fuckfest starring the intensely delicious Harlee McBride. She’d grow up to marry Richard Belzer and appear on Homicide as the ME before the arrival of hot-headed Michelle Forbes. Otherwise, Harlee isn’t well known at all, which I find to be a cult-culture oddity.
Harlee’s winning trait is a killer body wrapped up in a short-haired, tomboy package. A sort of girl next door beauty that pulled you closer to the screen, pants around your ankles, whenever her character seduced a man. It was you that she was seducing. Harlee wants to grab you and smile, camera trailing down her flank, as she grabs your cock and guides it into her. The gasp from the stable boy matches your own. Hers is a gap-toothed, flat-faced beauty that just screams: I am desperate, great in bed, and fully attainable because I don’t think I’m attractive.
You know the type.
Young Lady Chatterley doesn’t have the over the top sex of Cinderella, with the exception of the sex-scene in the back of the car where you get some great between the leg shots. It’s more of a straight tits and ass flick. The sex is mostly arty stuff – “erotica.” In Cinderella, they’re raping farm girls and they fucking know it! Embrace it! Now, finish each other off while I watch!
Young Lady Chatterley is the type of thing you leave behind as you move on to larger, greater things – like Brittany O’Connell’s first anal scene. You leave a lot behind when you see that, actually.
But, despite that, Harlee stuck with me. She was my type of gal. That whip-crack attitude, the hair, the wicked smile…the fucking tits. Her image burned into my young mind and the sex we had there, as I sat alone in the TV-light, feverishly masturbating, will never be forgotten. Your first porn is like your first girlfriend – violent, unpredictable, bipolar and too needy to say no to fisting.
Young Lady Chatterley was followed by the off-kilter and wholly unentertaining comedy Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was the Cinemax title. It’s now called Young Lady Chatterley II and, inexplicably, the first movie often gets the “lover” title. The mysterious otherworld of forgotten films often sees shifts in titles.
The sequel was made ten years later, a new direct-to-video release when I was in junior high. I was introduced to the films through the second one, since it was getting the new release play schedule – every weekend – and was a bit more risqué. Harlee, still in good shape, returns with the same shtick – tomboy next door who puts it in first – but this time she’s married and carrying out her seductions behind the back of her clueless husband. Joining the cast for helplessly lame comic relief is Batman Adam West. You also get some Monique Gabriele action, a sci-fi scream queen who cut a wild path through the lowest grade schlock out there. 1982’s Penthouse Pet, she’s one of those lovelies that late night horror geeks know well, but her only worthwhile roles were in Deathstalker II and Emmanuel V, where she gets a turn as Emmanuel. The fifth one is the one where she’s kidnapped by a Central American dictator and forced to serve as one of his slave girls and…Well…
The second Lady Chatterley film features three Penthouse pets, all getting it off, which is very strange because we’re supposed to be all about Harlee, right? She’s Lady Chatterley, she’s getting all the juicy sex scenes… But she’s eclipsed by these super-girls who all get pounded to death throughout the film. It’s a tough thing when your first girlfriend gets disrespected like that.
Right, let’s move on. Next on my list is something a bit more arty. Back in those youthful days of mine, there were only a handful of cable channels. That’s why I had time to fall out of trees and break my arm and get hit by cars. If we had the cable lineup there is today, I wouldn’t have these metal pins in my elbow. When not watching porn, the only other pay channel I messed around with was The Movie Channel. Joe Bob Briggs is responsible for our subscription to TMC. Friday nights with Joe Bob spinning monster movies, or crazy Andy Sidaris flicks, made my week. I looked forward to his show and the guest spots with cursing, lunatic directors and penthouse pets who bared their breasts. Joe Bob’s off kilter, uncensored humor and commentary honed my love for z-grade cinema. He became my cult hero and, thanks to him, I found myself landing on TMC fairly often. The channel’s overall taste in movies synced up with what I was looking for. They insisted on showing films on the hour, though, so they seemed to have an exhaustive library of weird filler to round out the time between movies.
A mesmerizing animated short popped up every month or so. It not only turned me onto classical music, it was a mystery. It was never named, never explained. My search for it began back there in the 80’s and not until this year did I actually find the source. In the short, a coke bottle thrown from a spaceship lands in a pool of muck, sparking an evolutionary march across a wild and surreal landscape that starts with slime and ends with the horrors of apocalyptic humanity as a complete version of Bolero rises and, then, pounds along. Strange creatures, constantly marching forward, morph into others along an imaginary evolutionary chain, always haunted by a monkey who swings from back to back, tree to tree, ever observant until it’s his turn to brutally take control. It’s pulse-pounding and mesmerizing.
It’s from Allegro Non Troppo, a strange and somewhat pretentious Italian animated/live-action comedy intended to be a high-brow mockery of Fantasia, but it becomes more of a commentary on the foibles of humanity. The intellectual satire is probably grand and welcome, but lost on me as my purpose was a nostalgic drive to get to the evolution sequence and zone out. Even more than a glimpse between Harlee McBride’s legs, it whips me back 20 years and surrounds me with nostalgic zen. Allegro Non Troppo is, coincidentally, also a 1977 film.
I feel I have achieved some level of purity, of grace, in the acquisition of these lost items. The mental and spiritual exercise in seeking them gives my otherwise humdrum life a goal. In finding them, the goal is reached, a rare thing in these sad lives of ours. Cinderella, I found out shortly before writing this, is on a fair quality fan-made DVD. Plans for the second Lady Chatterley are in the pipe. Everything has been found, except one. All that remains is Phil & Arthur Go Off, an inventive British series that ran for only five episodes in 1985. Each episode is a mockumentary where the titular comedians head out in a journalistic style to deal with topics such as the Loch Ness Monster or, well, French people. Aired once, early AM New Year’s morning, on the Discovery Channel in 1988, I was lucky enough to catch only one episode on tape. That tape, today, still exists, but the endless quest to find the entire series, in some sort of digital-friendly format that isn’t turning to vampire dust, continues. With that acquisition, I’ll be able to return, victorious, to Camelot, and my fair queen who’s fucking everybody in sight.
I can hear it now from the nags and critics in my life – Nacho, your personal Holy Grail is an obscure British TV show and, before that, a bunch of softcore porn?
Yep. The simple life is one of freedom and power. I don’t care if I’m living in a narrow little trailer as long as I can jack off to gap-toothed 70’s girls and laugh myself sick at gags hailing from the lower grade of Britcom. All hail, ye angels of mindless entertainment. Dance for me.