Year of Our Exploitation 1979, Part 4: H.O.T.S., THE LEGACY, LUNA, MEATBALLS, MR. MIKE’S MONDO VIDEO

1979 wasn’t all Roller Boogie and Skatetown USA. It was a whole bunch of other completely awesome flicks, too.

To me, 1979 comes right around the middle of “The Seventies”, per se, as I actually perceive the decade stretching – culturally, aesthetically and pubic hairstyle-wise – from mid-1973 all the way to the end of 1982, much the way that “The Sixties”, per se, kicked off with the JFK assassination (bang!) and the Beatles (yeah, yeah, yeah).

I also remember it as a dismally ugly year for fashion, as everyone looked caught between what the characters in Mad magazine’s “Lighter Side” strips would wear (and always did right up to creator Dave Berg’s final panel) and the cresting New Wave sensibility.

In retrospect, 1979 remains second to 1985 in terms of inescapable visual hideousness, but consider what I looked like as I hunted down whatever I could on the following collection of films: a bowl-cutted, amorphous, androgynously chubby 11-year old in aviator eyeglasses, a puffy down vest, and running shoes.

At least I never attempted to wedge my buttery prepubescent love-handles into a pair of designer jeans. Uh-oh, Sergio.

H.O.T.S.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Pops McBeardo’s taste in slap mags ran to those covering the then-thriving “Golden Age” of theatrically released porn movies: Adam Film World, Adult Cinema Review, Erotic X Film Guide, Cinema X, etc.

And each day, from the first time I hit porno paydirt until I was old enough to shoplift my own spank material, I routinely swiped the glossies out from under the sweaters in his closet and studied each and every millimeter of each and every page with the single-minded intensity of a Talmudic scholar – all the while maintaining a flawless D-minus average in school, mind you.

On occasion, these publications mixed up the mainstream hardcore onslaught with a rough-kink Avon title or an all-male film or even a “hard R” sexploitation flick. And that was how I initially came across H.O.T.S., albeit not literally, because I was still a few years away from first mining that (unfortunately) inexhaustible well of spewing glory.

One of the periodicals I purloined from Pops featured a multi-page spread on H.O.T.S. I’m guessing it must have been Adam Film World, as that was the one magazine that started in the ’60s in order to cover the burgeoning, soft-sex “adults only” movie market.

As I recall, the H.O.T.S. article seemed to have been written on the set of the actual movie shoot, promoting what would be a rolling release throughout North America, as was the custom in those halcyon days of drive-ins and grindhouses.

I can remember vividly and without question that the piece did include a shot of H.O.T.S.’s instantly iconic strip-football huddle.

From there, the next time H.O.T.S. turned up was as a TV guide listing for channels that were not accessible from the McBeardo home. I made a half-hearted attempt to listen to the movie from a bedroom in my grandmother’s Keansburg, New Jersey residence the following summer.

My friend Mickey lived next door and had cable TV. During a 1am H.O.T.S. broadcast, Mickey turned the set up as loud as he could for me as I pressed my ear against a window screen. But we were both afraid of getting busted, which limited the volume possibilities and, after a few minutes, we tossed in the (semen-free) towel.

Oddly, H.O.T.S. never turned up in any of the numerous Brooklyn video stores I frequented in the ’80s and, believe me, I looked for it. Hard. In fact, I didn’t see the movie until 1995 or some ridiculously late year, during my two-year tenure in Los Angeles.

From the opening over-the-top red-white-and-blue company credit for The Great American Dream Machine Movie Company, H.O.T.S. more than lived up to what I hoped it would be.

Beyond the boobs, of which there are more than any other 1979 effort this side of Caligula, there’s a circus seal, a brown bear enjoying an above-ground pool (for hilariously way too long), never-were vaudeville comics as bungling burglars, topless skydiving and, of course, BONADUCE jamming on an axe and brandishing a disco-tux scarf.

And all this from the screenwriting mind of Cheri Caffaro, naked heroine of the Ginger softcore spy movies.

H.O.T.S. is forever.

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THE LEGACY
The cat-face and the lady-hand on The Legacy’s poster intrigued me right away upon its release.

Those images brought to mind The Uncanny (1977), a killer kitty chiller starring Peter Cushing and Ray Milland (which I always thought I’d caught highly condensed on The CBS Late Movie, but it must have been on channel 9) as well as Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline (1978), the poster of which showcased a lady-neck. I never saw Bloodline, but I knew Sidney Sheldon’s books were dirty. I also knew he created I Dream of Jeannie, and the perverseness of that gem was never lost on me either.

NBC aired The Legacy in primetime in the middle of the summer 1982 and I tried to watch it while writing letters to a girl who was frequently annoyed by the letters I wrote to her. I didn’t pay much attention to the movie except to look up and silently note, at one point, “Hey! There’s Roger Daltrey! Gross!”

I spent a lot of time and energy in high-school pretending not to hate The Who. I had my reasons.

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LUNA
By 1979, I was deeply enmeshed in The 50 Worst Films of All Time by The Medved Brothers, as well as scouring TV Guide each week and circling any title rated “BOMB” in the annual Leonard Maltin Movie Guide. On top of this, my favorite question to ask adults, which I did often, was: “What’s the worst movie you ever saw?”

So when I heard the movie critic on WOR radio guffawing and going berserk about how ludicrous this new Jill Clayburgh movie called Luna was, I paid close attention.

At the time, Jill Clayburgh was a huge, A-list, name-above-the-title superstar, which is unimaginable now, just like with George Segal and Elliot Gould). And, in Luna, she portrays a put-upon mother who manually gratifies her own son’s engorged neediness, masturbates herself with the side of junior’s head, and also shows off one of the hairiest (Caucasian) maternity-chutes ever captured on film.

Had I gotten hip to those mo(i)st intriguing Luna details, I believe I would have actually tried to con my way into Manhattan to catch a screening.

After all, I had managed to watch mammoth chunks of the CBS mini-series adaptation of Pete Hamill’s motherfucker novel Flesh and Blood (1979, of course) without – gulp – Moms McBeardo finding out.

So when properly motivated, there was some stuff I could pull off. Like healthy pieces of my psyche.

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MEATBALLS
Fortunately or unfortunately (on as many levels as you might imagine), Pops McBeardo never seemed to be around late at night on the weekends and, thus, by age 8 I was a maniacal Saturday Night Live fanatic.

Certainly, this did not jibe well with Pops, who so loathed the social satire of even Mad magazine that – once I started really fucking up in school halfway through fourth grade – he tore up my beloved, voluminous collection of Mads that dated back to the early ’60s, and he made me help him, every rip of the way.

Alas, Moms McB was more understanding – I believe the proper term is “closer to sanity” – and not only did she sneak me contraband copies of Mad, she let me watch and audiotape every episode of SNL, every week.

Nonetheless, The Parents McBeardo did form a united front to forbid their 9-turning-10-year-old firstborn child to see National Lampoon’s Animal House as it initially conquered the universe in the summer of 1978.

Maybe they made the right decision. Who knows? Look where I am now.

The following July, even Pops had to greenlight my seeing the PG-rated Meatballs. So they definitely got that one right.

Even prior to the movie, I had switched allegiances from #1 Belushi fan to #1 Bill Murray fan, largely inspired by his legendary plea for acceptance, “The New Kid”, where Murray proudly identified himself as Catholic. I could relate.

In a childhood where whatever healthy guidance and loving protection I received came from beer-chugging, hearty-partying, Hawaiian-shirt-clad, (recently) ex-hippie, (eternally) jokester uncles, it was great to see their show business avatar – “Billy”, as they called him – on TV every Saturday.

The prospect of Billy in a movie, where he ran a summer camp, which meant A) teen girl counselors in bikinis and B) no parents around – well, that loomed as nothing less than miraculous.

Meatballs, of course, more than delivered, and I saw it repeatedly throughout its run both at the Airport Plaza Theater in Hazlet and its late-August last gasp at Keansburg’s Colonial movie palace. Then came subsequent decades of TV airings.

My love of Meatballs even inspired me to write my first (in a lifetime series) of angry, argumentative letters to a media figure: New York Daily News film reviewer Ernest Leogrande, who foolishly awarded Meatballs a single star. He never wrote back (unlike Tom Snyder, to whom I wrote in protest of what I thought was a short-shrift he gave to Uncle Floyd on The Tomorrow Show. For that I received a nifty postcard!).

To me, Meatballs’ sole element of disappointment was that the superhumanly stacked brunette on the right side of Bill Murray on the movie’s most familiar poster DOES NOT ACTUALLY EXIST IN THE MOVIE. Everybody else on the poster is in the film. But not HER!

I’m not sure when I figured out that Kristine DeBell, who played Camp Northstar’s counselor-in-training A.L., had been the titular fairy tale figure in the X-rated Alice in Wonderland (1976), on which I had been fixated nonstop three summers earlier, but that would have made up for such a blatant bait-and-switch.

Eh … it just doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. It just! Doesn’t!! Matter!!!

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MR. MIKE’S MONDO VIDEO
There is much I can write about Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video, along with my lifetime-spanning investigation into claims the theatrical version was accompanied by a Mr. Bill short in which the clay hero is forcibly sodomized by his nemesis, Sluggo (after Mr. Hand directly applies Vaseline – trés proto-cuckold-porn, no?).

And I have written it. It’s over at Mr. Skin. Go now and read all about my take on Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video and Mr. Bill’s Naked Truth.

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