Oprah Movie Club Pick for February--Part One: Up!


1976 sexploitation mess

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Following the murder (by piranha) of sadomasochistic Adolf Schwartz, a lot of people have sexual intercourse, mostly outdoors.

I was pretty much done after "Back to the reservation, Pocahontas" and "Ooh, it's all red. Looks like you've been fucking an Indian." But I was bored far before that. This is X-rated and sleazy although it's tame for the former and at least tries to be satiric and goofy enough for the latter. With 70s-era Meyer, it's like a grown child indulging fantasies. Kinks abound, and although I'm probably not going to complain much about large-breasted women bouncing on men like they're trampolines, so much of the episodes in this episodic, might-as-well-be-plotless pornographic who-done-it seem to go on for an eternity. Witness the scene where a cop gets a blow job. The sound effects are insane, and the scene just goes on and on and on and on. I think it's longer than any fellatio I've ever experienced anyway. There's a scene where Bo Duke chases and then punches a large-breasted (natch) woman before raping her. It wouldn't be easy to watch anyway, but it's definitely not easy to watch for the amount of screen time the act is given, especially with added wooden springy sound effects. Sex happens in various places and various positions, and after a while, enough was enough. It's not a real pornographic movie, so I was longing for a story of some kind.

I did enjoy zipper cam, something I'm surprised Tarantino hasn't borrowed.

It's too bad because from the beginning to the death-by-piranha, this was at least creative and weird enough to keep me going. You had a nude woman in a tree introducing it all--and like a raunchily incompetent one-woman Greek chorus, she pops in every once in a while to fail at clearing things up for the audience--informing us to "sheath [our] sword to the hilt. A pilgrim-hatted man uses a cat of nine tails on Hitler, and there are some wild sodomy sound effects. However, like the pilgrim's penis and most of the other scenes in this movie, the scene just goes on far too long.

I'm sorry I picked this one for the Oprah Movie Club. Something tells me that Oprah wouldn't like it at all.

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