Bone up here now and be there then.

***

You won’t believe the eye.

Nine minutes into Bloodsucking Freaks (1976), a giddy dwarf on stage in a theater hacksaws through the wrist off a screaming nude blonde. He removes her hand, kisses it and holds it aloft in triumph.

The well-dressed audience in attendance applauds.

“Now the eye, Ralphus!” instructs the saturnine Master of Ceremonies, and the dwarf reaches into the weeping victim’s ocular cavity, plucks out her meaty, dripping peeper, and pops it into his mouth. Then he chews it up and swallows it—right on camera.

Again, the hoity-toity audience applauds.

As stated: you won’t believe it.

But there it is.

And so a line is drawn in Bloodsucking Freaks that the movie itself repeatedly crosses by way of chains, chainsaws, whips, thumbscrews, starvation, brainwashing, brain-siphoning, and an unholy host other atrocious demonstrations of man’s inhumanity to man (or, more specifically, man’s in humanity to naked woman) beyond what even the most grossout-hardened and/or legitimately perverse filmgoer could conceive.

Believe me. I tried. As a sixteen-year-old horror fanatic in 1985, when I first saw Bloodsucking Freaks on VHS, the movie surpassed my darkest hopes and even my most uncomfortable fantasies, besting the only occasionally shared contents of our collective psychological sub-cellars that one would normally pass off as a “sick joke.”

Bloodsucking Freaks is sick, and it’s funny, but unlike the best-known products of the studio it launched—New York’s unequal parts despicable and dismissible Troma Entertainment–this movie is no joke.

Our hero, as it were, is Sardu (Seamus O’Brien), an elegant, highly histrionic older gentleman in warlock garb who runs The Theater of the Macabre in Manhattan’s Soho district, then a burgeoning enclave of artists and performers on the cutting edge (pun, here, intended). Ralphus (Luis Dejesus) is his midget assistant and constant companion.

To secure performers for their nightly extravaganzas, Sardu runs a white-slavery ring. Virginal young women get delivered in crates, kept nude and unfed in a basement cage, and then are procured as needed for grotesque sexual tortures, both on stage and off.

Sardu and Ralphus use these bedraggled slaves as furniture and, in one rib-tickler of a scene, as a dartboard. While gentlemanly quaffing steins of beer, they toss darts at a target painted on one girl’s anus. Then they play backgammon using severed fingers.

Among the theater’s human resource suppliers is The Doctor (Ernie Pysher), a mad dentist who we watch yank out a woman’s teeth with pliers and then drill a hole into her head, into which he inserts a straw and sucks out what the goop inside.

Between such sensory-overloading set pieces, Bloodsucking Freaks’ plot hinges on Sardu kidnapping snooty critic theater Creasy Silo (Allan Delay) and famous ballerina Natasha D’Natalie (Viju Krem). The dancer’s boyfriend, NFL superstar Tom Maverick (Niles McMaster), and the NYPD’s Sergeant John Tucci (Dan Fauci) pursue her disappearance into the pits of Sardu’s diabolical dominion.

Writer-director Joel M. Reed cites plasma-sopped exploitation pioneer Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Wizard of Gore (1970) as Bloodsucking Freaks’ jumping-off point.

He has also pointed out the gangbusters business that “Prince of Puke” John Waters’ Pink Flamingoes (1972) had been doing throughout the decade.

To make an impact in that cinematic milieu of taboo-shattering box office triumphs, Reed deigned to push further and pummel harder than anyone ever had before—or (almost) since.

As mentioned, Bloodsucking Freaks is no easy parody (the immediate, damnable bastion of horror filmmakers who doubt their ability to make an effective horror film—later Troma providing numerous execrable examples), but it is loaded with guffaws, and even studded with satire.

Creasy Silo is based on notoriously nitpicky New York Post theater reviewer Clive Barnes, Tom Maverick is a send-up of New York Jets phenomenon Joe Namath, and Natasha D’Natalie is a stand-in for ballet star Natalia Makarova, then the toast of Manhattan.

There’s also a moment when Sardu is negotiating a slave girl deal by phone with a kinky weirdo who’s plainly supposed to be Henry Kissinger. Bloodsucking Freaks is audacious enough that, were it to be made today, he’d be selling Barack Obama live ingredients for a cannibal cookout.

Aside from Reed’s odd skills on display here in crafting a well-paced, consistently effective film (they’re odd because if you ever see his handful of lesser-known works, you’ll understand how this one was a fluke), the performances elevate Bloodsucking Freaks further still from mere geek show to something unforgettable.

Delay, Fauci, and McMaster (who appeared on the ABC soap Edge of Night) are great, as is Krem, a real-life fashion model who convincingly pulls off her deadly pas-de-deux.

And then there’s Sardu and Ralphus.

Seamus O’Brien gives one of the great high camp performances in all of cinema. It’s impossible to watch Bloodsucking Freaks and not believe that this lanky, crystal-eyed, effete weirdo doesn’t exist, that once the cameras shut off that somehow this ghoul just took off his sorcerer robe and went home.

O’Brien starred in the long-running Off Broadway institution The Fantasticks throughout the filming of Bloodsucking Freaks. His only other movie credit is The Happy Hooker (1975). After Sardu, whatever body of berserk work might have lain ahead of him got snuffed out during a knife fight with a burglar in 1977. Remarkably, O’Brien was only 41 when he died.

As with Chaka the monkey boy on TV’s Land of the Lost, the one instantly identifiable character in Bloodsucking Freaks is homicidal half-pint Ralphus. Luis De Jesus danced as

a space alien in funk group Parliament Funkadelic’s lavish concert productions and, later, donned an Ewok costume for Return of the Jedi (1983).

His most celebrated non-Ralphus film role, however, is playing the title character opposite porn star Vanessa Del Rio in the 1971 hardcore loop, The Anal Dwarf.

The media hubbub of the past decade surrounding so-called “torture porn horror” on the order of Saw, Hostel, and Human Centipede has always begged one question: where were all these tight-asses and tsk-tskers for the previous three decades since the dawn of Bloodsucking Freaks?

Granted, Saw and Hostel come from Hollywood and played at multiplexes, but Bloodsucking Freaks has always been around.

Troma released it to grindhouses and drive-ins twice, first in 1976 under the title The Incredible Torture Show (T.I.T.S., get it?) and then again as Bloodsucking Freaks in 1984. For the rerelease, the militant feminist group Women Against Pornography demonstrated outside the 42^nd Street theater where it played. They were tipped off well in advance by Troma’s publicity department. Pickets sell tickets.

Bloodsucking Freaks then lived on as a teenage VCR litmus test in the ’80s, often paired with the shockumentary Faces of Death, and as an arthouse midnight movie. England banned it outright, listing the film high among the verboten “Video Nasties” (a controversy kicked off by Faces of Death in the first place).

In the 1990s, Bloodsucking Freaks turned up again in a popular bootleg video series of Caliugla cash-ins. Amidst a renaming frenzy that saw Nero and Poppea (1982) issued as Caligula Reincarnated as Nero, and Gestapo’s Last Orgy (1977) as Caligula Reincarnated as Hitler, Bloodsucking Freaks came out under the moniker, The Heritage of Caligula: An Orgy of Sick Minds.

That is my favorite title of anything, ever.

I am a fan of the Saw series and the first Hostel (Human Centipede is a just an amusing concept tailor-made for the present cultural reign of Internet nerds; the movie isn’t even necessary), but they each address issues beyond the mere carnage on screen. So, too, do the recent spate of almost unbearably intense and cruel horror films from France—in particular, Inside (2007) and Martyrs (2007).

Not so Bloodsucking Freaks. Yes, there is one chilling moment, when the cop decides to go dirty, that conjures the dread of the kindly gas station attendant turning out to be Leatherface’s cohort in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).

And perhaps there is something deeper to be read in the upper-crust decadents of New York Society traveling to a dank art colony for polite consumption of murder and dismemberment.

The theatergoers in the movie think Sardu’s heinous spectacles are all fake. We know that they’re real—except we know that we’re watching a movie that we know is fake, so what’s “real” isn’t really real. But maybe we’re reacting like it is. Or maybe not.

Regardless, the power of Bloodsucking Freaks is in its own joy of relentless bombastictransgression. A movie where Ralphus gets head from an actual decapitated noggin should only close, as this one does, with a parting shot of a naked nubile biting into a severed penis placed in a hot dog bun.

With relish.

The events described hereafter take place two years after what went down in that first piece.

A few key pieces of information: A) Madonna Boots is the nickname of the blonde cheerleader from New Jersey to whom I lost my virginity, and B) between 1985 and 1987, I managed to drop about 150 pounds off my delicate frame, roughly cutting my overall bulk in half.

It didn’t help. As you can find out below.

***************

The last time I saw Madonna Boots was on November 27, 1987. It was the day after Thanksgiving.

Bootsy, as she liked to be called, was a freshman at Montclair State University in New Jersey. I was in my third semester at the State University of New York at Purchase, a public arts academy in endlessly dull Westchester County, just north of New York City.

I ran the college radio station, which got me a lot of free records and an abusable telephone.

While not going to class and not getting laid, I phoned Madonna Boots at school as the holiday season started. Things had gotten that bad. Since arriving at college, I had not so much as accidentally bumped knees with a female. No dates. No kissing. No hand-holding. Nothing.

For that, I lost 150 pounds?

The lone “almost” exception was Dottie Woodward, known around campus as The Girl From Mars. What a nutbar. A charmer of a nutbar, though.

Dottie was a ballet major who looked a ’50s advertising drawing of a spunky, strawberry-blonde scamp. She talked kooky and she liked the Monkees and my Hawaiian shirts and we both had the complete Weird Al Yankovic discography and we immediately hit it off. Just not enough (for me).

People assumed Dottie and I were a couple for the first few months of school, which both delighted and depressed me: on the one hand, it meant I was perceived as human enough to have a girlfriend; but in reality, she wasn’t actually my Girlfriend From Mars, so the fact of my subhumanism remained unevolved.

One night, Dottie was drunk and I was not. I was sitting in my dorm room, drawing heinously offensive posters to promote my WPUR program and talking to my friend Springo.

Dottie sashayed in and sat on my lap.

I freaked. Bad. But not outwardly. I just barely kept it together enough to not jump up and go hide in a corner. Here was the very first moment in my entire 18 years that a girl was expressing genuine attraction to me. Ho. Lee. Shit.

“I’m tired,” Dottie said. “Let’s go lie down.” She led me to the bed and we got under my garish Marimekko comforter. We kept talking to Springo. Dottie snuggled into me.

Then, a whole bunch of bozos I knew came by my room to hang out. I’d spent the previous few years of my adolescence in dire isolation and tragic loneliness; why did I have to be Captain Popularity now?

Dottie seemed extremely comfortable. One by one, my chatty pals gave me a thumb’s up or a wink and then took off. Somebody even dragged Springo out, too. And then it was upon The Girl From Mars and me.

Silence. Darkness. Warmth. Sex.

Only not.

I froze. Dottie who, again, didn’t come by her outer-space moniker accidentally, was even wackier when she drank. She babbled a little bit, wrapped an arm around me, put her head on my chest, and fell asleep.

I stayed awake.

All night.

I just lay stiff (yes, in every sense), with this adorable, appropriate, happy-to-be-there ballerina pressed up against me. I prayed for her to wake up and kiss me. It was biologically impossible for me to make any sort of first move. That’s when fate intervened, in the manner to which I had become accustomed.

This being 1986, the walls surrounding my bed contained a velvet Elvis painting, Freddy Krueger pin-ups, and a shrine to Howard Stern. The main eye-catcher, though, was a massive, four-foot-by-six-foot French poster for the Italian gore-fest Suspiria. Real chick-bait.

From the day I first taped that monstrosity up, the poster never so much as slipped an millimeter—until about 4:30 am on the one (and only) night I had a girl in my bed at SUNY Purchase. Yes: Suspiria came crashing down on Dottie Woodward and me.

It woke Dottie up, whereupon she tried to act cool for a minute, and then left.

Ah, well. At least I could get some sleep. Someday I’d be dead so, drifting off, I took some comfort in that.

From there, Dottie immediately got over whatever motivated her to climb into bed with me. And on she moved. I did. too … to nowhere and nobody.

It was that track record that prompted me to call Madonna Boots just before Thanksgiving.

“What do yewwww want?” was how Boots replied when I told her who was calling.

“I just wanted to say hi. I’m the president of the campus radio station, so I get free use of the phone.”

That was not true—I used the phone freely, but the school had to pay for whatever bills I ran up, which I attributed to the station’s AM-signal delivery system into the dorms. They believed it.

“Yeah. Whatever. Your school is for losers. Montclair State is awesome. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Ha! Of course not! You fat again?”

“No.”
“Why are you calling me?” Bootsy said.

“I’m going to be in the city the day after Thanksgiving,” I told her. “We should get together. We can catch up.”

“You drink? You get high?” she asked.

“No. I mean, sometimes I do. But not a lot.”

“You’re a fuckin’ loser. You should freebase. It’s the best way to do coke.”

“I did ’shrooms last semester. It was fun. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“I have a guy I see. He’s 25. I have threeways with him and his friends. One time I did him and four other guys at once. It was awesome. You ever do stuff like that?”

Before I could answer (and probably lie), she cut me off: “Of course not. You’re a loser. One guy was black. You think you have a big dick? This guy was like King Kong!”

The specifics of Bootsy’s sex-and-drug adventures weren’t a turn-on, but the escalation of her recklessness was. It meant she might break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar one more time.

“What are we going to do in the city?” she asked me. “You gonna take me out? You gonna take me do a movie and buy me dinner and get me something nice?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’m a class act.”

“Jesus Christ. All right. Meet me at the bus station. Bring money.”

When Friday finally came, I stood at the New Jersey Transit Gate in the Port Authority terminal and heard, “Ewww. You lost all that weight and your skin didn’t clear up?”

Welcome back, Madonna Boots.

***

We walked up 42nd Street. The Deuce.

In 1987, Times Square was still the heart of New York City vice and 42nd Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was its main cum-clogged artery.

The Deuce pumped sex and death and every joy and horror between them round the clock—all day and night, every day and night, all the way up until it didn’t.

As crack, AIDS, and—deadliest of all—home video ascended in the second half of the ’80s, the end was at hand (and gland) for the Deuce. But there was still some awesomely repugnant life left there as Madonna Boots and I traversed eastward up the big four-two.

I had been going to double and triple features at the trashpit movie palaces on 42nd Street since my first few weeks in high school. But for any number of reasons, I only ever went alone. I preferred it that way. Still, I have to say it was a kick sharing the Deuce with Madonna Boots that day.

The last time—the only other time, in fact (at that point)—I walked 42nd Street with a female was 11 years earlier. I was eight. My mother took me into the city for a Broadway show and then announced that she was going to show me “the worst place in the world.”

I was already delirious from the sidewalk-to-sky wallpapering of pornography in Times Square, so I experienced whatever the prepubescent equivalent of a mainline speedball was when Moms marched me up the actual Deuce, saying, “Don’t look at anyone in the face. But just look around at this. Isn’t it a shame?”

Hookers. Most of them mostly nude. Pimps. Real, scary crazies saying and doing real scary craziness. And naked lady pictures! Better than Playboy! Out in the open! Everywhere you looked!

Every few feet there were theaters showing horror movies, too, and a lot of karate stuff. One movie place had a crazy display of African revolutionaries under its marquee, with a video loop playing of people getting shot and cut up in the jungle.

It was, indeed, the worst place in the world and the best thing I had ever experienced.

Now I was treating Madonna Boots to this pustular funhouse, starting with lunch at Howard Johnson’s. She didn’t complain about the fried clam platter. She complained about me, though.

“You have to, like, be a loser, don’t you?” she said. “I bet you go to those peep shows!”

“I don’t!” I said. “I kind of want to, but I never had the nerve. I just go the regular movies on 42nd Street.”

The “regular” movies on 42nd Street, of course, being Make Them Die Slowly, Blood Sucking Freaks, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Trap Them and Kill Them, and Mad Monkey Kung Fu.

“You even have one girlfriend since me?”

“Yeah, I went out with this girl last summer.”

“She broke up with you, though, right? Right.”

Right.

After lunch, we had one movie option and one movie option only: Flowers in the Attic, an adaptation of a Gothic horror romance novel that was immensely popular with teenage girls in the 1980s.

Largely forgotten now, Flowers and its follow-up books by V.C. Andrews (Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns—get the drift?) were very much their era’s equivalent of the 21st century Twilight craze.

But whereas Twilight’s kick is sexual abstinence, the Flowers books were powered by passionate incest.

I could respect that.

Flowers in the Attic was playing on the Deuce proper at the extra bizarro, extra dangerous Anco theater back up by the bus station. I wasn’t taking anything remotely blonde and female as Madonna Boots into the Anco, though, so we settled on the massive National Theater on the northeast corner of Broadway.

The movie sucked, even by Madonna Boots’ standards, and she liked The Bride with Sting and Jennifer Beals (and my fingers on her left nipple as we watched it. It was our very first date. And my very first everything).

In her disappointment, however, she offered one killer idea toward salvaging the day’s entertainment:

“Let’s go to one of them peep shows!”

My heart sang. Victory!

***********

The peep show we picked wasn’t just any peep show, either. It was Peepland. Smack in the middle of the Deuce. The former site of Hubert’s Flea Circus, an arcade with a freak museum and a live sideshow that included, back in the early 1960s, a canary-voiced warbler calling himself Larry Love who would later hit it big as Tiny Tim. In the 80s, Peepland specialized in bestiality videos.

I had studied years for this moment.

Above Peepland’s entrance was a 20-foot-tall eye shaped like a keyhole, flanked on either side by a 25-cent piece twice the size of a tractor-trailer tire. Therein was the promise: Beyond this door, you could peep in upon the infinite, all for the price of a 12-and-a-half pieces of Bazooka bubblegum.

Madonna Boots took my hand, out of fear, as we approached. Ironically, I swelled with confidence and felt absolutely bulletproof as I led our way inside, as though the hundred-pound, five-foot-maybe-nothing golden-haired wisp attached to me were a suit of armor and bejeweled crown at the same time.

As long as there was a girl with me, I wasn’t in Peepland because I had to be. I was there just, you know, for kicks. That gave me one up—the only one that mattered—on everybody else in the joint, who appeared to just be blurs of business suits peppered with darktown strutters in tattered army coats speeding in and out of wall after wall of narrow red doors.

It was bright inside. So bright. Flashy. Whirling. Hot. Neon quarters spun along the upper walls while neon hussy legs kicked. Mirrors lined every available surface, giving the glare something to glare off on and back out onto itself. It was like an orgy on circus train crashed into casino where an orgy was going on.

At the back, above a staircase, blinking arrow pointed downward. It beckoned to where there were

LIVE!

NUDE!

GIRLS!

We followed the scorching pink road.

Downstairs was even brighter than upstairs, accompanied by noise. Loud noise. Crazy noise. Pop radio station Z-100 blared from a stadium-worthy sound system, above which came sing-song siren wails:

“Come AWWWWWWWNNNN, Fellas!”

“Let’s GOOOOOO, Fellas!”

“Get INSIIIIIIIDE, Fellas!”

Those Live Nude Girls on the other side of all these doors were calling us fellas.

What a quaint term.

One mammoth fella sat in a little banker’s booth at the foot of the stairs. He had his own bellowing chant:

“TOKENS! Get your TOKENS! Don’t be muffuckin’ standin’ around! TOKENS! Get yo muffuckin’ TOKENS!”

Bootsy dug her fingers into my fist. She wasn’t scared anymore. She was … tickled.

We approached Grand Moff Token.

“How many?” he grunted.

I handed him a five.

“You want five dollars in tokens?”

“I-I don’t…”

“Take two dollars in tokens. Tip the girls with the rest. Go! Next! TOKENS!”

I took the eight coins and three singles and tried to figure out what to do next.

The bottom level of Peepland housed a circular floor-to-ceiling structure in the middle, and two semi-circular structures along the walls. Each of the round structures was lined with doors, in and out of which men popped. The women, I deduced, were on the other side.

Boots and I stepped into one of the doors and closed it. It was a booth the size of an upright coffin with a plastic guard covering a window at eye level. Below it glowed a slot for putting in tokens. I put them in. The shade whirred up and there they were.

LIVE!

NUDE!

GIRLS!

And there we were.

Peepland was like an aquarium, but there was no glass between you and the exotic creatures on display. Once that window raised, you had open-air air access to a half-dozen unclothed women, some of whom were being molested through windows by other customers, others of whom were sitting on the floor smoking and reading the Daily News.

Madonna Boots and I stood side-by-side, a-gawk.

A Puerto Rican face filled the window.

“Tipping?”

“No,” I said.

The face vanished.

A new face appeared.

“Tipping?”

The window shade buzzed and slid back down.

“Put more tokens in!” Bootsy demanded.

I did. The window went back up.

The first Puerto Rican face came back.

“You gotta tip, baby.”

I gave her a dollar.

“It’s two dollars, baby. Then you can touch. Top or bottom.”

“You can TOUCH them?” Madonna Boots squealed.

Puerto Rican Face laughed, walked away, and yelled to her cohorts, “There’s a GIRL in here!”

This time the Live Nude Girls gawked back at us, pointing and giggling.

A live nude black chick eyeballed Boots and said, “Are you a lesbian, baby?”

Boots surged past me, stuck her entire blonde head through the open window and sarcastically roared, “Yeah! And I’m hot for YEEEEWWWWW!!!!”

She pulled back in right in time for the plastic guard to roll back down.

“Fucking bitch,” she huffed. “Callin’ me a lesbian.”

I couldn’t believe it!

***

Mutually seeking to end the day and, with it, our entire relationship, on a high note, I walked Madonna Boots back to the Port Authority.

Upon departing, we didn’t hug. Madonna Boots just said, “Do something about your skin.”

She was always looking out for me, that one.

I walked off, newly armed—and permanently disabled—with the knowledge that for three dollars, you could grope live nude girl boobs and butts 24 hours a day at Peepland.  And it was probably like that at all the live peeps.

There were more than a dozen peep shows on 42nd Street alone, and nearly as many on each block of Times Square, plus all along 8th Avenue from Penn Station on 34th up to the high 40s. How many live nude girls worked at Peepland at any given time. I saw about six, and that was just one of three stages, so it must be about 20s.

So how many live nude boobs and butts, given unlimited financial restrictions, could a “fella” grope in one continuous pillaging of midtown Manhattan?

My plan was to go to Tad’s Steaks, get a groovy $2.99 leather-and-lard dinner, and do this math. Nature interrupted. I suddenly had to take a sick shit.

More than runaway teen prostitutes, more than kiddie-porn chickenhawks, more than dope pushers and 50-cent blowjob crack ladies—and way, way more than buses—the Port Authority Bus Terminal was known for the depravity of its men’s rooms.

Under the most refined of circumstances, any area where a man is allowed to openly apply his mitts to his dick will become complicated. Hence the invention (and necessity) of the now requisite guards between urinals (or, as comedian Jim Norton refers to them, “fun blockers”).

The Port Authority in the 1980s was the least refined of circumstances. Literally.

Alas, the Port Authority provided the only public restroom facilities in all of midtown Manhattan, so when you filled your bladder, you took your chances. But bladder, schmadder, I was in full colonic tumult and would have to venture into—yeee-gads—a Port Authority toilet stall. This was a first (and how I wish I could say it was a last).

I went into the closest facility and the stink hit like rotating sledgehammers to each nostrol. Anus and Clorox. Ancient and rotten. Just underneath, the instant-headache of amyl-nitrate poppers. Everywhere.

Eyes forward and feets not failin’ me now, I darted for the bowls. Fuck. Each stall was occupado. I had to wait. Commotion by the urinals caught my eye. 

One oily Third World reveler bubbled with glee as he manually engaged his foot-long neighbor. He gave me the repeated head tilt and cocked eyebrow that said, “Come on, join the fun. Plenty of illegal cab driver palm here for everyone.”

I looked down at the floor as a means of politely refusing the invitation. But then I looked back at the happy ball-handler doing his thing—and, even moreso, the other guy’s thing—because, come on, that’s something to look at.

Finally, a stall opened up. I hopped inside, shut the door, and peered into the commode and, there, gazed down unto a living history of man’s inhumanity to porcelain stacked pandemic-birthingly high above the rim.

Shit. Piss. Puke. Blood. Piss with bloody shit in it. Semen (with sperm and without). Condoms. Needles. Puke full of condoms and needles. Condoms and needles full of shitty piss-blood semen-puke.

Regardless, I had to contribute to the long and storied history of biohazardous defeat before me. Thusly did I carefully roll down my torn-jeans-and-longjohns combo squatted as far as I could about the pestilential pile and leaned forward enough to let fly my shit-pipe.

And let fly I did, spraying a diarrhetic topping upon that septic sundae that would have made any previous contributor proud, envious and/or hungry, depending on what particular circumstance let him to be utilizing a Port Authority toilet.

Relieved and eager to move on, I confidently wiped myself and tossed the soiled TP wads atop the mess where they stuck like Velcro-stripped balls in those dart games you’d get for Christmas in the ’70s.

And then, through sheer force of habit, I made one mistake I’d keep playing back in my mind in slow motion, desperately trying to will the action into reverse, but to no avail: I flushed.

What do you think happens when you flush a Port Authority toilet that’s been stuffed solid with a thousand different ingredients for biological warfare?

That is what happened.

The toilet contents heaved momentarily and then erupted skyward. I caught all the shrapnel full-on—solid, liquid and gas. Some of it even dripped down inside my combat boots.

I just laughed.

That was all there was do.

I had myself a fine guffaw, left the stall, gave a nod and a smile to the swarthy onanist society along the wall and went to Tad’s Steaks as scheduled.

From my table, I looked hard into the giant eye above Peepland. I had taken a peek that day into a universe of limitless possibilities. All it required was an adequate supply of the right kind of tokens.

I could get that.

And/or I’d die trying.

Either way worked.

6. LIFE ON THE FLIPSIDE
NBC, 1988

Twenty-three years after its single episode’s single airing, I think about Life on the Flipside almost every day. There’s no sane reason for this to be happening but, at some point, regularly, I flash back to my parents’ basement during the dark summer of 1988, watching NBC burn off this DOA pilot.

I hate that and I hate it.

Flipside, as the show was originally titled, was announced by Don Johnson’s production company as a sitcom vehicle for Ringo Starr, who was then the opposite-of-hot off his commercial campaign for Sun Country Wine Coolers.

The finished version, Life on the Flipside, seems very much created by and for individuals would declare Ringo to be their favorite Beatle.

Only Ringo’s not in it. Which, for sure, was for the best.

Now I love Ringo. Not only is he a Beatle, he’s The Funny Beatle, and he crafted one of the funniest, most godlike come-backs I’ve ever heard: when someone said, “How do you respond to people who claim you’re not a very good drummer,” Ringo replied, “I tell them I was the drummer in the Beatles.”

However, declaring Ringo to be your favorite Beatle is not unlike declaring Shemp to be your favorite Stooge.

It simply strains credulity, making one question the sincerity of the statement from even among the most likable and admirable of committed Stoogephiles, while also confirming, permanently, a desperation to be cute among the most construction-boot-to-the-bicuspids-inviting Stooge-fan fakers.

(Beatles-ranking-wise, the correct answer, of course, is that Ringo is the second best, with George and Paul tied for first.)

Life on the Flipside focuses on middle-aged rock star Tripper Day—yes, read it and puke—who doubles as a single dad when not selling out hockey arenas.

The anti-Ringo stepping in for Ringo here is British cipher Trevor Eve. Who? I don’t know either.

As Tripper, he looks to have pilfered his producer’s Miami Vice wardrobe and then rubbed his face all of Don’s johnson in hope that the pube-burns would visually approximate stubble.

Tripper’s kids’ name are exactly as clever an endearing as his own: vaguely Italian teen Sonny Day (Frank Whalley), blonde pubescent Better Bea Day (Traci Lind) and wee lil’ Shea Day (Jarret Lennon), named for his pop’s stadium show after which was conceived. Haw haw.

Support color comes in the behemoth form of roadie/guru Mr. Smith, played by Dennis Burkley, a staple of 70s and 80s TV sitcoms anytime a fat biker type was needed. Mr. Burkley boasts his own transcendent rocksploitation history, as well: he stars as psycho bassist-turned-rapist “Pig” in David F. Friedman’s trash classic Bummer!

But that was Bummer and this is Life on the Flipside.

Bummer.

Intended as the decadent cherry alight atop this bowel-cake is Michael Des Barres as evil, weasely manager/promoter Elliot Weedle.

I said it in 1988, and before, and I’ll say it now, and again: Why on fucking fuck do I know who Michael Des Barres is?

How has this glossy glop of negative matter functioned as a rock star for forty years while neither rocking nor being a star?

Why did his ex-wife become his wife in the first place? I’m talking about Pamela Des Barres, a backstage groupie who’s famous for doing to countless rock superstars every night what Rod Stewart was rumored to have done that one time that led to quite the stomach-pumping and all manner of nasty talk that only went away once the myth morphed into Bon Jovi.

I know Michael Des Barres was in a failed band called Detective. I know he sang lead in the fake punk band Scum of the Earth on WKRP in Cincinnati (one credit I can heartily get behind). I know he took over for Robert Palmer in 1986 when the Power Station went on tour.

And I am properly disgusted with myself for knowing these things.

But I ask you: WHY do I—or you, or anybody—know who Michael Des Barres is.

Well … we do. And he was in Life on the Flipside.

As to why I think about this ditched pilot episode daily, I have even less than an idea than I do regarding Mr. Des Barres.

It has to do, a lot, I think, with the slimy little kid playing Shea Day.

I am quite fond of children in general and I never like to point out anyone’s unattractive qualities (let alone a six-year-old), but sunken-eyed, oil-mop-topped moppet Jarret Lennon (think of the first Chris Partridge, only more … from hunger) did a lot of TV in the late 80s.

Seeing this poor tyke always got me clamping my jaw tight and thinking: “Gosh … if this is what his post-toddler-hood looks like, I shudder to contemplate the puberty that awaits him.”

Life on the Flipside showcases young Mr. Lennon front and center during a tantrum scene where he rips into his old man and punctuates the tirade by running off after yelling: “David Bowie puts on a better live show than you!”

Flabbergasted, our man Tripper Day then seeks council from burly redneck Mr. Jones, explaining, “He said David Bowie puts on a better live show than me!”

Mr. Jones waits a side-splitting comic beat and then drawls, “David Bowie DOES put on a better live show’n you!”

I hate that exchange beyond description. It spooks me. As noted, I think about it daily. I hate it for simply being, and I hate that I’ve for so long had to hate it.

In fact, I hate it so much, I can only love it.

Of further note regarding Life on the Flipside is that another of its producers was Amy Heckerling, director of Clueless and Fast Times of Ridgemont High, and that it was co-scripted by highly hilarious and deranged funnyman Ron Zimmerman, now the 60ish boy-toy of Cher.

Also, Traci Lind aka Better Bea Day, grew up to show off her Better B-cups in a couple of movies and even, in The Road to Wellville, her own Flipside.

Now, go:

7. DELTA HOUSE
ABC, 1979

Mad magazine saved my life when I was six years old. I exaggerate not here, as my earliest memories of suicidal depression date from kindergarten onward.

Then, at a 1974 flea market, I scored a shopping bag full of old Mads for a quarter and got a respite from that relentless post-toddler fatalism.

Pops McBeardo, my Vietnam vet Green Beret father, did not approve. To Pops, Mad was the product of irreverent “punks” created to subvert children and belch in the face of authority.

He was correct, of course. We just differed (then and now) as to whether that was (and is) a bad thing.

Even more contentious was my second signal that perhaps soldiering on past first grade might hold some promise: Saturday Night Live.

Pint-sized insomniac that I was, I caught the original broadcast of the third episode and instantly got hooked. Need I even point out that John Belushi was my immediate favorite?

As my childhood dribbled on, I grew more depressed and despondent and hostile and, therefore, more dependent on Mad and SNL for relief.

Pops, in turn, blamed these sources of aid and comfort for making me the way I was.

It rushed to a volcanic head in the summer of 1978, as I turned 10, and National Lampoon’s Animal House erupted among us.

My experience with National Lampoon, to that point, was a couple of freaked out flip-throughs in the magazine section at the Route 35 Shop Rite in Hazlet, New Jersey.

Quick enough, I learned to go directly to the “Foto Funnies”, mentally photograph the black-and-white boobs therein, and put it back on the top rack. I’d get there. In time.

A movie, though, with my comedy hero. Where the boobs would be in color. And moving around. I could hardly stand to wait a second, let alone the better part of a decade. So as each of my older relatives and teenage day-camp counselors saw Animal House, I quizzed them for details, even keeping a notebook, where I more or less accurately construed the plot and all the major gag points.

Imagine my stupefied ecstasy, then, when out of nowhere, I saw a promo for Delta House. Suddenly, there would be a sitcom version of Animal House with most of the original cast and even an interesting Belushi stand-in: Josh Mostel, son of Zero, of whom I was a lifelong fan (which is as powerful a testament as any to my 1970s New York City incubation).

The trick would be getting past Pops when Delta House premiered one Thursday, but that was easy enough. We had a tiny black-and-white Zenith in the basement. I volunteered to walk our Akita after dinner and, once I got back, slipped downstairs while he fussed over the dog, threw a blanket on top of the TV and myself, and inserted my transistor radio earplug into the side of the set.

The show came on. There they were! D-Day! Flounder! Hoover! Dean Freakin’ Wormer! A groovy pseudo-’60s frat rock theme song! Bluto’s brother, “Blotto”! The Delta House itself!

And then, Christ … that fucking bullshit show fucking sucked.

Keep in mind that I was ten and Delta House was essentially bringing my dreams to life (minus the boobs, of course): here was the Animal House gang in my house every week. And, still, I knew that each and every episode was, as Michael Jackson once said of what coated the walls of his jailhouse restroom facilities, “doo-doo feces.”

Delta House was (way) more feeble-minded than The Brady Bunch and driven by (way) more ludicrous plot devices than Gilligan’s Island, minus the charm of those program’s joke-world contrivances—plus the fact that they were created for kids.

And I was a kid, so I knew stupid and queer when I saw it. Blotto, for example, showing feats of strength by bench-pressing a TV while Flounder sat on it—for ten uninterrupted minutes—defined stupid and queer. Most unforgivably, it was unfunny and stupid and queer.

In fact, the rival networks’ Animal House rip-offs—Co-Ed Fever, which aired once on CBS and NBC’s Brothers and Sisters—were infinitely more amusing than Delta House. And they were appalling.

Still, I faked it. I raved about Delta House at school. I repeated the routine of sneaking to the basement to watch even after ABC switched it to Saturday nights. From January to April 1979, I lied and lived with the lying.

Then Delta House was gone, the victim of an inevitable ratings Waterloo, and forgotten by the world but not, of course, by me. In hindsight, I started to wonder if perhaps, as with my early viewing of SCTV, Delta House operated on a comedic plane beyond what my fifth-grade sensibilities could entirely process.

After all, Blotto bench-pressing Flounder, in the meta-world of Mellonville where it would appear as an impossibly idiotic sitcomification of a taboo-shattering R-rated comedy, would be brilliantly hilarious. Perhaps it was just a case of abstract thinking capabilities not yet on full-firing capability.

Reading If You Don’t Buy This Book, We’ll Kill This Dog, National Lampoon publisher Matty Simmons’ memoir, only fueled my hind-sighted hopefulness. He points out there that the pilot was written by the original Animal House team and that Nat Lamp all-stars on the order John Hughes, Ted Mann and Tod Carroll scripted subsequent episodes.

Simmons claims the show simply fell victim to network standards and that it went out with a sterling reputation. “People were thanking us for bringing physical comedy back to television,” he writes.

Sometime in the early 2000s, I came across a bootleg DVD of the entire run of Delta House episodes at a horror convention. At last, I’d find peace.

Need I even tell you how much more dire Delta House is than I remembered it?

It is. And it’s worse than you can even imagine, too.

It’s incalculably inferior to Fast Times, the pallid CBS version of Fast Times at Ridgemont High that cropped up momentarily in 1986 and even more congealed by brain death than the (actually, kind of amazing) Fox network Revenge of the Nerds pilot.

To watch Delta House is to see cocaine vomited onto your TV screen from the inside. It is beyond amateurish and beyond inept to the point of causing stress. One can only wonder: at the moment that some studio fiend looked up from his desktop snow-bank to deem this bilge air-worthy, were there no adults in charge of Hollywood and, by larger extent, the world?

Still, Delta House never reaches a nadir of incompetence that breaks through to any manner or pleasure, perverse or otherwise. It’s too fatally boring.

Allow me to run down:

• Episodes focus mostly on the largely silent D-Day as he does … nothing.

• The characters mug, rarely speak and just sort of saunter around the set.

• The cheapest of laugh tracks punctuates the inactivity in staggered, but fairly constant bursts.

• Slapstick set-ups seem to occur, but not really (let alone do they have any payoffs).

• Dean Wormer growls.

• Skinny, very ’70s California blonde Michelle Pfeiffer—a highly different creature from the “bombshell” figures of the show’s 1962 setting—wanders past playing a character called, naturally, “The Bombshell”.

• … and then it’s over.

That’s it. Fifteen times. Delta House.

And so Delta House, to its core, is an entirely unlovely and unlovable thing. But, as with so much other fecal deluges polluting my personal history and always-on consciousness, fondness for it exists because, as described above, it is “mine.”

It felt like they made Delta House for me. They failed. I tried to cover for them. I tried to justify the lies as time marched on. Eventually, I came to grips with the barbaric reality.

Time wounds all heels.

My obsessive/compulsive association with “boob” and “tube” likely commenced in utero and it flourishes to this very keystroke, albeit not in the guise it took most deeply in my formative years: that of the half-hour situation comedy.

Aside from the Sunday night Fox cartoons (and, if I’m around, The Office), I presently view no primetime network funny fare except by happenstance.

This just sort of occurred over the past decade or so ago.  And if you’d known me up to say, the Seinfeld finale, you’d recognize this as an apocalyptic change of habit.

As for my favorite sitcoms, meaning the ones I think are genuinely good and funny, there are few surprises: the aforementioned Seinfeld, The Abbot & Costello Show (from which Seinfeld was conceived), All in the Family, Bosom Buddies, Bewitched, Addams Family, Munsters, The Partridge Family, Hogan’s Heroes, Green Acres—all your expected answers.

For much of my life I had a complicated relationship with The Brady Bunch.

As a kid, I genuinely thought the show was stupid and unfunny, but I could not NOT watch it twice every day, three times if I was home sick from school (as the Bunch aired at 9am, 5pm and 6pm on channel 5 on weekdays throughout the 70s, and then for a solid hour on Saturday afternoons).

Around the time that the Lunachicks released “Jan Brady”, I surrendered to simply, non-ironically loving the story of the lovely lady (and her bohunk second hubby with SUCH a delish secret!).

The lowest-profile sitcom that I will forever champion is It’s Your Move, which pitted Jason Bateman against the future next-door-neighbor from Married With Children (who was dating Jason’s mom, played by Caren Kaye of My Tutor) in a stunningly inventive battle to ruin one another’s entire universes week in and week out.

It ran one season, 1984-85, and I’m often nicely surprised by how many people remember it, in particular the brilliant “Dregs of Humanity” episode (and no, no, nooooo, I ain’t no Arrested Development fan).

Small Wonder, of course, is a meisterwürk of genius in a league by itself that would require a hundred doctoral dissertations to properly begin to analytically appreciate.

One severely obscure show that I’d love to see now is No Soap Radio, an attempt at Monty Python-style surrealism that aired for a few weeks after Bosom Buddies in 1982. Clips exist online. They’re pretty dopey, but No Soap was, and remains, one of the goddamndest things ever broadcast when everybody only had about six channels from which to choose.

Another two in the running got eliminated by being, respectively, a little bit too legitimately funny and a little bit too actually shitty—Silver Spoons and Out of This World, in that order.

Today, though, I come to … not quite celebrate, but rather illuminate a dire near-dozen sitcoms to which I have been and, to varying degrees remain, profoundly attached.

None of them are good. Each of them is perfect. And their presence in my skull, and soul, is great. And deep.

Let the countdown commence:

10. MALIBU, CA
Syndicated, 1998-2000
All I ever called this show was “The Kids on the Beach.” It’s a perfect summation and, had they gone with my utilitarian title, instead of a mere two seasons, Malibu, CA might have run as long as perhaps three, maybe even three-and-a-half. But probably not.

Modeled on the TNBC prototypes (Saved by the Bell, California Dreams and the forgotten plea for racial homogeny, City Guys), Malibu crashed the morning-programming bash about a half-decade past the party getting called on account of everyone growing their final pubic hair.

The premise was teenage fraternal twin brothers move from New York City to the titular coastline to help run their pop’s surfside malt shop.

Local color included neo-Spicoli Murray (Brandon Brooks) who riffed on the drug-free stoner surf-dude archetype by adding proto-emo eye makeup.

There was also, notably, balloon-bosomed beach bunny Traycee, played by child pageant queen turned Playboy centerfold Priscilla Taylor. It’s really easy to find pictures of her boobies (I especially like the look of genuine distress in her faux-lesbo pose at right).

“The Kids on the Beach” aired early Sunday mornings in New York and mine were the only eyes ever laid upon it. I was in my 30s by then. And sober.

I don’t suppose I could have in any way been more opposite at that point than a “Kid on the Beach”, but somebody, somewhere would have to someday pay proper homage to Murray’s guy-liner.

*******************************

9. THE UGILY FAMILY
ABC, 1980
One of the profound annual joys of my childhood was when TV networks used their summer schedules to air pilot episodes of series on which they had passed.

(Look, I got whatever non-misery I could wherever I could back then.)

NBC sporadically assembled four sitcom episodes into anthology “movies”, while ABC normally had regular slots for pilots throughout the swelter season. One-hour pilots aired on Mondays as “specials” while half-hour editions typically followed reruns of hit shows or, in 1982, on Saturday nights. That was where I came across The Ugily Family.

Actually, I first “came across” TUF the previous Sunday, while flipping through the Daily News’s weekly TV supplement and being struck by a photo of Al Molinaro surrounded by a wife and kids that made him look like — (let’s see… who’s a good circa-82 gorge-o to invoke here?… ah!)—Susan Anton by comparison. Being as kind as possible, one might describe these peoples’ appearance as “ethnic.”

Compounding the shock of the image was the title of the show, which I plainly read (as it was no doubt intended) to be “THE UGLY FAMILY.”

This I had to see!

Happy Days was still going strong in ’80, so it seemed odd that Al might attempt a spin-off. Had he learned nothing (like the rest of us) from Mr. T & Tina, Noriyuki “Pat” Morita’s legendary 1976 Hindenburg for which he walked away from Arnold’s?

And it was not likely that there’d be a “Mr. Miyagi”-style big-screen role for the once-and-forever Murray the Cop several years hence, either.

More than that though, the prospect floored me that this group of actors was volunteering to be labeled, perhaps forever if the show took off, as THE UGLY FAMILY.

Puberty loomed for me in ’80, and the preadolescent uglies had set upon me fast, ferociously and for what I was sure would be forever.

So I wanted no part of announcing my own hideousness to humanity any more than I had to by merely facing the world every day.

Alas, as I settled in front of the tube on hazy July Saturday at 8pm, like all the cool kids do, I learned that “You-JEE-Lee” was the correct pronunciation: “The You-JEE-Lee Family.”

Like the aforementioned Malibu, CA, the Ugily premise was standard fish-out-of-water—or more specifically, baccala-out-of-New-Brunswick—with our oily, kinky-haired heroes relocating from New Jersey to Southern California.

Once there, the Ugilies met their human-surfboard neighbors, the Bings, headed by iron-jawed ’70s television staples Lyle Waggoner and Elaine Joyce.

Kids today will never know the pleasures of such third-tier TV celebrities like those titans: too faded to be asked back for another Love Boat shot, just right to sit it on The Match Game (albeit most likely the daytime edition). That’s their loss—the stars and the kids alike.

Daughter Susan Ugily (Susan Elliot) physically brought to mind Rhea Perlman, but crossed with diarrhea. She fretted about how she’d fare in an upcoming “disco sand-dancing” competition. This being a sitcom, Susan won the contest. And another disco sand-dancing lie was perpetuated upon the public.

The Ugily Family aired just that once and I’ve never met anyone else who saw it. I’ve asked. Believe me.

*****************************************

8. ALL THAT GLITTERS
Syndicated, 1977

My desperation to experience life beyond what was limited to kids  initially manifested itself in my refusing to sleep at night. Ever. As a result, I grew up intimately knowledgeable of Tom Snyder, David Susskind and, best of all, Joe Franklin.

My favorites, of course, were the countless movies of every stripe that ran across the dial until the near-dawn “Star Spangled Banner” sign-off. Channel 9, for one, ran a horror movie every night at 3am and, perhaps not coincidentally, was also New York’s lone TV outlet that broadcast 24 hours straight under the banner “9 All Night.”

For a while, in the wake of the brief Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman phenomenon (a show I watched religiously, frantically trying to understand—and failing, as an eight-year-old should have), oddball “sophisticated” sitcoms ran in late-night syndication.

None was odder—nor could conceivably have blown harder—than All That Glitters, a semi-sci-fi satire from Marty Hartman creator Norman Lear.

The show looked and played like a standard five-nights-a-week soap opera centered on a corporation, but its gimmick was that the gender roles were reversed: women moved and shook society while menfolk did household stuff and got that masters’ snatches wet.

Linda Gray, just prior to being Sue Ellen on Dallas, played TV’s first shemale on All That Glitters. I think the title was even a reference to her cock.

Now you’re picturing Linda Gray’s cock, aren’t you? Yes. You are. Is it nice? Did you give Linda Gray a nice cock in your mind? What about her balls? If not, make it a nice cock-and-balls. Why not? Shemale Linda Gray is your mental image, so give her a huge, succulent plantain-and-apple-sack now. Go ahead. She’s yours forever!

I hated All That Glitters. I still hate it. Yet I loved it. It felt like … mine.

The fact is that I forced myself to watch All That Glitters in the hope that its “sexually subversive” premise would result in something actually sexual on-screen.

That quixotic drive—to somehow, someway be there when, for some reason, TV went berserk and presented bona fide nudity—fueled, without exaggerating, 40-percent of my childhood undertakings.

I just realized that my dream came true, of course, with Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl, but we were all decades past Skinemax at the point, so … feh.

All That Glitters only served to further harden a cynical little boy into a man who didn’t even drop his chicken wing when a tit finally popped out on regular TV.

For shame, Norman Lear.

Ah, well. At least we got Linda Gray’s cock-and-balls out the deal.

Now.

*****************************************

TUNE IN NEXT TIME!

When the countdown continues later this week, you’ll  get down with the clowns of Delta House, and sell your soul for a single season of A Year at the Top!

G’wan, now, to Mr. Skin’s official 2011 Anatomy Awards and vote for your favorites to win The Peepers’ Choice Awards.

There’s an iPad prize but, really, it’s your civic duty.

Come, peruse the nominudes for Mr. Skin’s 12th Annual Anatomy Awards:

BREAST PICTURE
Piranha 3D
Chloe
Love and Other Drugs
Boogie Woogie
Lake Placid 3

McBeardo’s Pick: Piranha 3D, glands-down. Here was a self-conscious take on grindhouse excess, that never veers into the self-congratulations of neo-Troma spittle like Machete. The outright gall of the never-ending underwater lesbian ballet is topped only by naturally monster-bosomed Gianna Michaels nude parasailing as her triple-G cups explode right off the screen and compete with popcorn for space in your slack-jawed maw.

*****************

BEST NUDE TV SHOW
Boardwalk Empire
Gravity
Hung
Weeds
Spartacus: Blood and Sand

McBeardo’s Pick: Boardwalk Empire. Spartacus came out swinging a terrible, swift sword, to be sure—Xena! At last! Nude!—but the audacity of the increasing-to-the-point-of-gynecological nakedness of Paz De La Huerta on Boardwalk every week, coupled with gratuitous Gretch Mol gazongas, made me look forward most to each Sunday night trip down Atlantic Titty way.

BEST CELEBRITY LESBIAN SCENE
Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in Black Swan
Amanda Seyfried and Julianne Moore in Chloe
Kelly Brook and Riley Steele in Piranha 3D
Elena Anaya and Natasha Yarovenko in Room in Rome
Heather Graham and Jaime Winston in Boogie Woogie

McBeardo’s Pick: The worst is Black Swan. And I don’t just mean this year, I mean maybe the worst ever. I can think of only one more appallingly asexual sex scene between desirable women, in the 1993 softcore abomination Wild Cactus. Hefty-chested Playmate India Allen and raven-maned Michelle Moffet get in bed and just sort of gyrate in the direction toward one another, without touching. Still, it beats the tampons out of the Portman-Kunis anti-event.

The winner, then, is Chloe. Amanda Seyfried looks like a jugsy Rainbeaux Smith and post-partum redhead nipples—a la the lusciously used milk-spigots of Ms. Moore—are impossible to top where I come from. And onto.

*****

That’s just three of the categories on which you can vote. Others include Best Boobs, Best Butt – Nude, Best Butt – Thong, Best Full Frontal and Nudecomer of the Year.

So, go—vote for the Peepers’ Choice Awards.

You can watch all of the above-mentioned nude scenes, and more, for free at Mr. Skin.

And as noted, you might win an iPad.

That way, McBeardo can be with you all the time.

Just the way you love it.

*****************

On a skingential note, it’s Ass Wednesday here in the Mr. Skin office, an annual rite-of-schwing in which employees get the day off—the reason simply being: the sheer hilariousness of having company holiday called “Ass Wednesday.”

Of course, I’m at my desk, properly working, because—for the love of teat, I’m Mr. Skin’s Head Writer, what ever else could I want to be doing?

During my first few winters here, Ass Wednesday coincided, as you might expect, with the papist high holiday of Ash Wednesday.

Alas, midway through last decade, a trial-by-hellfire period known as The Skinquisition ensued wherein the company was unduly influenced by  … an out-of-place sort, let us say, who, where brains might go, seemed to have nothing but a clump of already-been-chewed Communion wafers.

Upon his very first visit to Skin Central, in fact, the Head Skinquisitor approached the guys in the back who comb through videos for visible nipples and, with friendly seriousness, asked them:

“Say, anybody know where the nearest Catholic church is around here?”

Yes. This really happened.

And, as it should be, Mr. Skin’s pube-spotting department could not help out.

The Skinquisition lasted three long years (the exact amount of time of Christ’s ministry on earth. Co-skin-cidence?), during which Ass Wednesday went the way of Friday cheeseburgers during Lent.

At some point in the final chapters of The Skinquisition, Ass Wednesday reappeared, albeit it weeks removed from Ash Wednesday, thus ruining the joke (as usual).

But we got it back. And here tit is.

Now none of this should be taken as a blight on Mr. Skin himself.

Yes, Mr. Skin is a real man and, yes, I would publicly sport a feces-smear on my forehead each Ass Wednesday as a display of my loving devotion to him. Or any other day. In fact, right now. And forever.

I’m just explaining why Ass Wednesday is a solid month prior to Ash Wednesday.

And I’m setting up that I’m at the empty Mr. Skin office and I come, today, to share with you our skinfinitely more skin-portant yearly ritual—the nominudes for the 12th Annual Anatomy Awards.

Tit’s all right, this Life of McBeardo.

Really. Tit is.

That was the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1987, when Madonna Boots, the sexually deranged cheerleader to whom I lost my virginity, essentially dragged me (neither kicking nor screaming, just sweating) into Peepland on 42nd Street. (And that story’s coming. Fret not.)

There was one previous exception, in summertime 1984: Cinema Kings Highway, Brooklyn’s very first adults-only movie theater, running the 1970 German skin-flick He and She for more than a year straight.

Amazingly, this mastubationasium remains open and festering to this day, so now Cinema Kings Highway is Brooklyn’s very last adults-only movie theater, too.

On a side note, Queens still lays claim to the mighty Fair theater,  which now shows Bollywood Films in its main auditorium, while an insanely huge  labyrinth of hardcore screening rooms and buddy booths oozes just a few feet away. That must be comfortable for all involved.

Okay, back to Brooklyn.

For me, throughout the ’70s, Cinema Kings Highway was my Saturday biking objective, every week.

I’d park across the street, make it look like I was waiting for my mother to come out of a deli and then I would just stare and stare … and wonder and wonder… and wait and wait.

So it was a solid decade in coming when, on a hot July evening, I deigned to finally penetrate whatever might lie beyond the foreboding box office. But I couldn’t do it alone.

Motivating me to motivate my friend Dino Guardino and Kevin Kilgallen to join me for Cinema Kings Highway sojourn was Bad Girls (1981), a hardcore classic that remained in regular theatrical circulation for years.

It starred Pia Snow, a willowy brunette with whom I’d been infatuated since Café Flesh (1982) and an Erotic X-Film Guide spread on Bad Girls itself, wherein she was pictured nude outdoors in Sapphic rapture, just above the caption: “Lilting Lesbianism.”

There is no calculating how many times I’ve copped that very alliteration in my subsequent career.

Pia eventually transitioned into R-rated B-movie screen queen Michelle Bauer but, for one week—and for one week only!—she could be basked in, larger-than-lust, on the big screen at the Cinema Kings Highway.

Oh, how I needed to bask.

We let confident Kevin first approach the ticket taker. She was an ancient Jewish bubbe-type who barely raised her cat-shaped eyeglasses from her Waldbaum’s word search booklet.

I dropped my voice while ponying up the (pricey) $6 admission and coughed, “One.”

Again, the auditory trickery was unnecessary.

In New York City circa 1984, any 12-year-old kid could stroll past any beat cop on the way into any bar and thereupon order scotch and unfiltered cigarettes without a scintilla of hassle.

So somebody’s old nana collecting cash at the local pull-yourself-palace was hardly someone prone to make a peep in protest.

Once inside the Cinema Kings Highway, the surroundings looked like any other slightly above-average Brooklyn moviehouse, complete with a candy counter and whirring popcorn machine.

It wasn’t as swank as the Brook or the Kingsway, but it was way noticeably less rickety than the Nostrand or the Kent, let alone the beat-to-feces Highway.

I was, however, overcome with a very particular strain of self-consciousness: an all-encompassing, soul-deep combination of awe, reverence and terror.

“This feels like church,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t dare even whisper.

Just like I wouldn’t in church.

A shared fear among the three of us was palpable as we headed into the spacious auditorium and sat in the first three seats visible in the cavernous darkness. With perfect timing, Bad Girls was just ending.

Several rows ahead, a patron stood up and stretched, exposing upper ass-crack. He adjusted his trousers, buckled his belt and departed. Another satisfied comer.

The next feature started immediately. On screen, a pair of anonymous lady-hands assembled images in a scrapbook while a cut-rate torch song smokily lamented on the soundtrack:

“[Spoken word intro]
You know, I’ve heard it’s been said
Tis better to have loved and lost
Than to have never loved at all
But whoever said that
Never lost at love…

[Blaring in full song voice]
Sand
 … and 
RAAAAAIN!

Sand
 … and 
RAAAAAAIN!….”

It turned out to be Chaudes adolescentes, a dubbed 1981 French important retitled The Arrangement (tagline: “Arrange them ANY way you like!”). We stuck around for about a half hour of the movie.

There was a scene of Euro fashion models who may have been sisters (I was praying) making out in a convertible during a photo shoot that damn near turned my Jams shorts into an industrial disaster at the Elmer’s Glue factory.

When a newly arrived audience member sidled up nearby us, chock full of radiant “let’s get friendly” vibes, we pulled the ripcord and split.

The trudge back up Kings Highway was initially marked by intense silence as our 16-year-old hormonal-lava-infused hard-ons dissipated.

Kevin spoke first: “We have to bring girls to see those movies!”

That would never happen for us as a trio, but we agreed it was a swell idea (later, as the grunge-rock Caligula of the early 1990s, I would pointedly to return to the Cinema Kings Highway with female accompaniment). Kids today will never know such excitement.

Throughout the remainder of the stroll home, Dino and I had a chocolate milk speed-drinking contest.

We both won.

I turned to see a Mexican midget on the staircase that led up to the balcony. He leaned back on one elbow, had the other arm draped over his knee and seductively parted his thighs while giving me a wink.

“PSSSSST! Papi!” he shout-whispered. “Papi! Papi!”

He raised and lowered his brow repeatedly, rolled his eyes and tilted his head a few quick times up toward the balcony, and made some kissing noises.

“Papi! Please!” he insisted. “Please, Papi! Mwah-Mwah-Mwah! Papi-Papi-Papi!”

I did not take my Hispanic half-pint admirer up on his proposition (I swear), but I strutted out into the glaring Eighth Avenue sunlight with my head held high, as my ego soared to dizzying heights well above and beyond the nearby roofs of Show World and the Port Authority bus terminal.

That Mexican midget wanted me.

And that was all I ever wanted anyone to ever do. Ever.

Back in December 1984, not even that diseased and desperate a come-on would have come my way. And, Lor-dee, did I know it.

Life was condemned to be eked out by me and my hand exclusively—and by life I mean any and all love relations—so I would at least put my all into the acquisition of outside stimulation, fully accepted the fact that none of them would be human. Ever.

Movies were as close as I’d come. And come. And come.

Home video was well established by the ’84 holiday season, but a market for softcore sex on actual movie theater screens remained vibrant (if not, per se, “healthy”), as evidenced by the likes of 1976’s brilliantly titled but shockingly tame Chesty Anderson, US Navy continuing to bounce around 42nd Street and bottom thirds of triple bills in outer-borough grindhouses.

Except for the Porky’s-spawned R-rated teen sex comedies that were aimed directly at getting under-17 me to the box office and in a theater seat (by any means necessary), I’d ordinarily wait for the more overtly spank-intended material to hit VHS. There, it could be much more easily enjoyed as the original interactive entertainment it was.

A handful of exceptions actually prompted me to buy tickets, watch the movie, and then go home to hammer out my one-handed review: Emmanuelle IV, wherein series heroine Sylvia Kristel gets plastic surgery and comes out Mya Negren (but thank goodness they left her lesbian tendencies intact); and New York Nights, an inexplicable take on the connected sex stories of La Ronde (the only knowledge of which I have is seeing it cited in sex-movie reviews) starring “real Penthouse Pets” that just screams “An All-Mafia Production.”

I saw both those releases earlier in 1984 at the Fortway Theater in Dyker Heights with my friend Ed O’Halloran. He lived right near the Fortway but, most importantly, that cozy five-plex was the one absolutely 100-percent guaranteed venue in all of Brooklyn that would let anyone, of any age, in to see any movie sans the slightest of hassles.

Countless numbers of my underage Brooklyn brethren caught both Dawn of the Dead and Caligula at the Fortway, to present the two most shining examples.

Another “no one under 17 admitted” movie that the very much under 17 Ed and I caught at Fortway was the crackpot Bo Derek showcase Bolero. However, we didn’t pay to see it, we just snuck in the previous summer after catching (and loving) C.H.U.D. in the auditorium next door.

For all of Bo’s bodaciousness in Bolero and other movies, I was always more charmed (and turned on) by her talk show appearances with her Svengali husband John Derek. It was he who discovered Bo, molded her into a salable commodity and proceeded to conquer pop culture by means of her naked body. Not only that, he had previously done the same with Ursula Andress in the ’60s and Linda Evans in the ’70s.

As much as I admired his screenwriting and directorial mastery of the Bo vehicles Tarzan the Ape Man and Bolero (and, later, the genuinely head-scratching Ghosts Can’t Do It), it was John Derek’s way with the ladies, and by direct extension, his power of the entire plane of reality before which I genuflected.

Still, I couldn’t masturbate to my admiration for John Derek. So it wasn’t him I was thinking of as I got off the M train at the Avenue J station one wet, snowy Friday afternoon in mid-December 1984 and saw the title Bolero emblazoned on the Midwood Theater marquee just across the street.

The Midwood specialized in second and third-run features for the gimmicky discout price of whatever the last two digits of the year were. This practice began in 1978, so a ticket cost 78 cents. In 1979, it went up to 79 cents, in 1980 it went to 80 cents and so on.

Bolero had debuted in August, so a run around Christmas (or more specifically, considering Avenue J, Hannukah), at 84 cents a pop, came right on schedule.

My gloveless fingers trembled as I gathered exactly 84 pennies to slide across the box office counter. The idea was to not make the ticket-seller look up and notice how young my features may have appeared amidst all my face-fat. She looked anyway. And she didn’t care. She just gave me a ticket and in I went. Those were the times.

As I entered the theater, I didn’t even know when the movie was starting. I figured I’d just settle in at whatever point the movie was at, watch it from there, and then stay for the whole next showing. Moms McBeardo wouldn’t start to freak until around 7, so I had plenty of time.

I happened to come in right near the end. As planned, I sat through the closing credits, the lights went up, I stuck around—which was totally kosher in those days—and waited until the theater got dark again and the previews started.

As the opening strains of the titular classical music piece piped in through the Midwoods state-of-the-20-years-earlier-art sound system, I glanced down at my light-up Casio watch (a gift from Uncle Vince, my confirmation sponsor). I got out early on Fridays, so it was exactly 3pm.

For some reason, it occurred to me to make note of the precise times in the movie when each nude scene happens.

I opened my LL Bean knapsack, took out a notebook and did just that.

And that is how, since I was 16 years old, I’ve been able to tell you that, yes, Bo does strip topless to frolic on the grounds of her boarding school during the opening credits (to the laughing delight of chauffeur George Kennedy) but, more impressively, the sheik licks honey from between her bare bo-bo’s 20 minutes in, she gets banged silly at 58 minutes, her attempt at a “skinfamous” Lady Godiva imitation occurs at the 1-hour, 28 minute mark and the most hilarious Hollywood orgasm prior to Showgirls’ pool scene sounds off about an hour and 35 minutes in.

Bear in mind, I wasn’t even that into Bo Derek. The Bolero moment that really knocked my socks crusty happens at the 38 minute mark, when 16-year-old British ingénude Olivia d’Abo stands up from a bubble-bath and Bo rinses her off.

“Look at you!” Bo exclaims while perusing Olivia’s impossibly pert young bazooms and dewy hair-pie.

“I am WUH-mon!” Olivia proclaims, thrusting her chest delectably forward (she’s supposed to have some nonsense approximation of a Spanish accent). “Juicy, too!”

Ms. d’Abo, with her sexy overbite and ripe curvaceousness, went on to TV stardom later, becoming best known as the older sister on The Wonder Years and as Vincent D’onofrio’s nation-hopping black-widow nemesis Nicole Wallace on Law and Order: Criminal Intent.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, she had already bewitched me a few months earlier by playing a teenage princess in a see-through nighty in Conan the Destroyer. I had unsheathed my terrible, swift sword to that one on video a few times already.

In Bolero, though, Olivia’s big naked reveal, compounded by the up-close inspection and implied lesbian attraction, hit me square in the dick, hard enough to k.o. any and all other bodily (or mental) organs I may have needed at the time. She was naked, yes, and a knockout, of course, but, crucially, this was a naked knockout who was my age.

Aside from Traci Lords —and we didn’t know it at the time—16-year-old nude bodies didn’t exist in porno movies or magazines (at least not any you didn’t have to know secret code words to be able to buy in Times Square snuff parlors) and all the “high school” chicks in raunchy farces like, say, Zapped! and The Last American Virgin were clearly in their twenties.

So Bolero offered me, a 16-year-old male, my one and only opportunity to ever lay my eyes on a 16-year-old female without her clothes on.

You can’t put a price on that but, alas, the Midwood movie theater did: 84 cents.

Therefor, after a weekend of revisiting Olivia d’Abo’s Bolero unveiling in my mind, Monday rolled around and I skipped my extra couple of chocolate milks and Cheez Doodles at lunch so I’d have 84 cents in my pocket when I got of the train that afternoon.

Best of all, I knew to get there right around 3:30 so I could settle in just in time for Olivia d’Abo’s b’dazzling nude scene.

I did as I planned and, afterward, I scooted 14 icy blocks home to take advantage of the hard-on I got in the theater. It was important for me that it the boner I went to work on in my bedroom be the same, continually sustained erection that I sprung in the theater, as it somehow connoted a connection to the living beauty on-screen.

On Tuesday, I planned on repeating the whole affair. But then I had another stroke of genius—emphasis quite intentionally placed there on the word before “of genius”.

I had a gigantic, dense, goose-down winter coat on when I entered the Midwood theater, which I’d just place on the seat next to me.

Why not keep it on my lap and do what I’d rush home to do right in the theater while the images played out larger-than-lust on the giant screen before me?

So that’s what I did. Right after school. With my heart pounding fast and my coat-concealed fist pounding even faster, I made love to a 16-year-old Olivia d’Abo while I was positioned off to the far left, in the back row of the cavernous, usher-free Midwood Theater.

Who knows where she actually was?

Then I did it again on Wednesday. And again on Thursday. Right at 3:38pm, each time.

To date, that was the best and most satisfying $4.20 any human has ever spent on any afternoon pick-me-up anywhere.

On Friday, they changed the show and I’d have to wait for Bolero to come out on video before I could revisit my 35mm affair-of-the-hard-parts.

Which I did.

Back then, I waited for a lot of things.

Soon enough, I’d start making things happen.

Like crazy.

Like Ugly George, like bag-lady/freedom fighter Billie Boggs, and like the manster I used to see on 42nd Street who had a finger growing out of the middle of his palm, Margaret Whiting was a champion charmer in a rare league of peculiarly beguiling local New York figures—super-intense emphasis on the “peculiar” there.

I’ll spare you the inevitable “Dude, where’s my New York City?” bellyaching, but these past few decades have eradicated this wholly distinct brand of Gotham celebrity—anti-stars who you just loved to let make your skin crawl.

Yes, I know Joe Franklin still mitzvahs among us, but he’s been off TV for 18 years now and he even recently moved out of his legendarily proto-Hoarders freak-pit of a Times Square office.

So things happen. Times change. And glazed, ancient, grape-shaped cabaret ladies depart this mortal coil to reunite with their incandescently homo porn star husbands in whatever weirdness may lay after—super-intense emphasis on the “lay” there.

Margaret Whiting, her New York Times obituary tells me, was discovered as a kid singer by songwriter Johnny Mercer and then emerged during her teens one of the most popular big band warblers of World War II.

From there, she scored numerous pop standard hits, became the toast of Broadway musical theater and remained among New York’s most elite nightclub songbirds who appeal to a very particular audience of men.

Just men.

Since her recent death on January 10, 2011, I’ve been checking Rex Reed’s column maniacally to read his eulogy, if you catch my rainbow drift.

As to how Margaret Whiting blipped on Youngman McBeardo’s radar, I’ll just turn it over to the Times completely:

“In her later years, Ms. Whiting was known to many as the unlikely wife of Jack Wrangler (originally John Stillman), a star of gay pornographic films in the 1970s who went on to become a cabaret and theater producer.”

Ms. Whiting and Mr. Wrangler, 22 years her junior, met in the 1970s, lived together for many years and married in 1994. She wrote about their relationship in an autobiography, “It Might as Well Be Spring,” saying it was based on similar interests and mutual respect, not sex. When they first became involved, he told her, “I’m gay,” to which she replied, “Only around the edges, dear.”

More directly, let us turn to the indispensable (and now very expensive) 1984 autobiography The Jack Wrangler Story of What’s a Nice Boy Like You Doing?, wherein Ms. Whiting suggests that our hero move in as her common-law spouse and, right before the lights dim on the Broadway show they’re attending, he blurts out:

“But I’m a fucking faggot!”

From the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s youth, Jack Wrangler and Margaret Whiting remained staple guests of local talk shows such as Live at Five, Stanley Siegel and, of course, the aforementioned Rabbi Franklin’s wee-hour kibbutz.

I was familiar with Jack Wrangler’s name before I ever saw him, though, by way of my childhood fixation on porn movie ads in the New York Post and the Daily News. I studied those newsprint paste-ups every day, occasionally for hours straight, desperately trying to absorb the illicit, adults-only thrills they so garishly portended.

Mr. Wrangler’s moniker stood out, among a glandful of others, because it appeared repeatedly in ads for both straight and gay porno movies (can you believe that the local newspapers came chock full of such things just a few pages away from the comics—every day?).

In particular, Wrangler’s name turned up regularly in films by stark queer auteur Joe Gage, the titles and ads for which always sort of chilled me (e.g.—Garage, Kansas City Trucking, L.A. Tool and Dye).

“How come they call it gay,” I wondered, “when it looks so depressing?”

I was eight.

When I finally caught sight of Jack Wrangler he seemed very much the opposite of depressed, flamoboyantly dishing and swishing on, I think, Midday Live, a noon chat show on channel 5 hosted by Bill Boggs (from whom the homeless headcase mentioned earlier took her literal street name).

Penis-size, in some roundabout way, came up and Jack explained that much of his on-screen impressiveness came courtesy of tricky camera angles, laughingly braying: “After all, I’m not a TRIPOD!”

For quite some time after that, I wondered what “tripod” meant. The context made me too scared to ask anybody.

A few years later, on a 1985 all porn-star episode of channel 5’s erudite overnight talker, The David Susskind Show, Jack repeated a variation on the line, and I didn’t mind. Neither did Gloria Leonard, Candida Royalle, Samantha Fox and Marc “10 1/2 Inch” Stevens, who paneled right alongside him.

(And by then I knew what a tripod was.)

Other than those couple of shots, though, if you wanted Jack Wrangler, you got Margaret Whiting and vice versa—on TV, I mean.

Actually … who knows?

All I do know is that this silver fox muscle queen and his plump grand-muh-mah whose makeup you could smell through the Zenith speaker were a routine presence on my formative years’ boob tube.

There, they’d perennially be, always glad-handing and beaming and gabbing away, clearly believing they were cocktail-and-caviar Noel Coward sophisticates come to suave, albeit—ooh!—naughty life.

Only he was a professional sperm-siphon.

And she was a foofy-coiffed balloon full of baby powder wrapped in sequins.

God, were they gross.

And, God, did I love them.

I still do.

Individually, the Whiting-Wranglers tickled me, as well. One of the first porn tapes I watched at an underage beer party was The Devil in Miss Jones 2, with Jack playing the male lead and literally shooting fire out of his dick.

“I told you that guy was a flamer!” I announced to a roomful of teenagers who, appropriately (and as usual), had no idea what I was talking about.

In 1986, channel 9, New York’s premiere round-the-clock horror movie outlet, ran and repeatedly reran an oddball special titled 4 Girls 4.

It was a behind-the-scenes look at a touring musical revue of the same name starring Rose Marie (of The Dick Van Dyke Show), Rosemary Clooney (of Coronet paper towel commercials), Helen O’Connell (some other retirement home singer) and, indeed, Margaret Whiting.

The special showed this (way) post-menopausal quartet playing to packed houses of deeply appreciative fans.

The three divas would scat-sing, finger-shake and ooze ICU “glamor” while, in between, Rose Marie performed grotesque baby-talk routines.

I have to say that, at home, tuned in deep every time, I numbered among those rabid admirers.

“This is just so fucking foul,” I’d think to myself, grinning from ear to ear. “I can’t get enough of it!”

Plus, apparently, I wasn’t alone in this fecactuh fandom.

Have you ever heard a joke on TV and thought, “Wait—did they write that exclusively for ME?!”

My greatest such experience occurred on a 1987 episode of Late Night with David Letterman. Chris Elliot was portraying a Liberace-esque, hyper-femme fancy-pantalooned piano maestro. He looked directly into the camera and announced, “And I want to give a great big hello to my dear friends Jack Wrangler and Margaret Whiting!”

I’m still laughing about it.

Alas, today, we shed a tear.

Jack Wrangler and Margaret Whiting remained a colorful New York presence until … well, this week.

They continued making headlines by finally marrying in 1994, and for suing New York City for $3 million in 1998 after Margaret tripped on a sidewalk crack and broke her hip.

Wrangler arrived at the lawsuit figure by counting $2 million for her injuries, and another hot mil for “loss of conjugal relations.”

Ah. They never lost it.

Sadly, we have now lost them both. Jack died in 2009, at age 62, from emphysema. Margaret left us at 86 from, simply, being 86. She is 1 Dead Girl 1.

You are gone, Jack and Margaret, but the heebies you jeebied linger on.

Long may you skeeve.

The most extreme examples I can think of are the endless permutations of Evil Dead II and Army of Darkness, which have appeared (and, as far as I know, continue to appear) in infinitely repackaged “collectible” forms, often with as seemingly little as a line of box copy changed to differentiate from the last gelt-reaping.

Those two particular titles, I’ll admit, may stick out to me because I hate those movies and resent their audiences so much, but also because they make me wonder if I’d ever succumb to that level of suckerosity.

I have to cop to purchasing two copies of Fantoma’s Forbidden Zone disc the day it came out because A) Forbidden Zone is my very favorite movie of all time, so I wanted to support its existence in any viable format and B) I correctly presumed it would go out of print, fairly pronto and definitely forever.

We got a review disc of the colorized Forbidden Zone at Mr. Skin, so that saved me the conundrum of whether or not to shell out for that one, too (I probably would have).

But other than that, I think … nah.

Then I’m reminded about Maniac.

And I remember that, in the past 15 or so years, I have purchased the Joe Spinnel/Bill Lustig splatterdamerung on a Special Edition VHS tape, on DVD, on DVD in a collector’s tin bearing the movie’s notorious blonde-scalp-with-boner poster art (really I just wanted that box to use on my desk as a psych-warfare weapon), and on a Special Edition DVD.

Plus, I ended up buying multiple Special Edition Maniac DVDs to give as gifts due to its containing the superb documentary The Joe Spinell Story, along with a few minutes of the never-completed Mr. Robbie: Maniac 2.

On top of that, any time in my adult life that Maniac has unspooled at a movie theater I could get to by showtime, I’ve shelled out for at least one ticket (often two—I’m that kind of date).

Now here comes Blue Underground with Maniac on Blu-ray in a 30th anniversary edition.

And there goes my cash again.

But, as always, it’s worth it.

Because, first and foremost, it’s friggin’ Maniac, but also because writer/director/Joe-Spinell-flame-keeper Lustig continually ups the value of each new version, always adding something utterly irresistible and, ultimately, invaluable.

If you’ve made it all the way to McBeardo, is it necessary for me to explain Maniac?

All right. Quickly.

Following the history-making success of Halloween in 1978, theater screens everywhere ran crimson with the life-juices of slit virgins via the slasher movie explosion.

And all those dozens upon dozens of masked killers and screaming teens led directly to the day after Christmas in1980, whereupon Maniac opened in Times Square.

Then all the subsequent dozens upon dozens of murdered adolescent movies that followed did so directly in Maniac’s wake.

It was a before-and-after moment, to be sure. And a doozy, at that.

Maniac’s story is typical (archetypal?) of the genre. Brooklyn boy Frank Zito (Spinell) grows up with some heavy-duty mommy issues. As an adult, he works them out by murdering women, slicing off the tops of their heads and placing the hair-trophies atop mannequins in his Bay Ridge basement apartment.

These things happen.

Along the way, Zito romances a gorgeous British fashion photographer, played by Bond girl Caroline Munro (who’s never done a nude scene, you know).

You’ll wonder why this glamorous European jet-setter would agree to go out with Zito, but then you just watch him order clams casino for the both of them and you simply marvel at such a master.

The gore effects by Tom Savini are gut-rupturing, the throbbing synth soundtrack by Jay Chattaway is unforgettable, and there’s a surprise ending. Sort of.

The Maniac team magnificently marketed the movie as a taboo experience that the Guardians of Moral Authority—aka “THEY”—didn’t want you to have.

It opened in theaters sans MPAA rating, but with an assurance that that “NO ONE Under 18 will be admitted” (right). What kind of atrocity could be UNRATABLE?

Around New York (and, later, Los Angeles and then everywhere else), the aforementioned head-hacker-with-a-hard-on artwork papered every visible public surface, and every late-night TV commercial break erupted with the warning: “MANIAC—It will tear the LIFE out of you!”

Most shrewdly, Lustig and company alerted the ever-itchin’-to-protest watch-bitch group Women Against Pornography (and their associates) to this outrage’s presence anywhere and everywhere it opened. Pickets, as we know, sell tickets.

There are better-crafted slasher films, there are scarier slasher films, and there are even more off-the-rubber-room-walls insane slasher films (Pieces, we salute ye), but what truly makes Maniac stand alone is the emotion that sops its every frame.

Love.

Love of the character. Love of the story. Love of the process. Love of the red-dyed caro syrup and exploded hamburger.

Maniacal love of all maniacal things maniacally Maniac.

No gore film—maybe no film, period—has ever made with more gushing, boundless love on the part of its creative team, the pounding, beaming heart of which, of course, is Mr. Joseph Spinell.

He was a most curious character, this fat, funny, oily, weirdly effete, superhumanly magnetic lump-monster who lived, until he died, with his mother in Queens.

Civilians know Spinell best as Stallone’s loan shark boss in Rocky and as a Corleone soldier in the first two Godfathers.

We all lost him in 1989.

The previously praised Joe Spinell Story—which remains on this new Blu-ray edition—does a brilliant job of analyzing and immortalizing him.

Spinell’s follow-up to Maniac, The Last Horror Film (1985), is another essential piece of his personal puzzle, particularly demonstrating how, given too much creative control, this force of freakdom would run everything he touched smack off the rails.

Shock of all shocks, the erstwhile junk-pushers at Troma have issued a top-notch Last Horror Film special edition DVD. Get it.

But back to Maniac on Blu-ray. Everything that’s been on the previous Maniac videos is here, only Blu-rayized, and the new stuff is so (chortle, chortle) KILLER that you’ll wonder how Lustig can continually top himself. Then you think of Joe and you feel how that … love.

The most amazing bits:

• • A visit with songwriter Michael Sembello, who had the monster hit “Maniac” from the Flashdance soundtrack. Here, he finally clears up that pop smash’s connection to the movie.
• • Local news reports from 1980-81 covering the Maniac controversy as it rolled out coast-to-coast.
• • Al Goldstein giving Maniac some “Fuuuuuuuuck you”’s on Midnight Blue.
• • An interview with composer Jay Chattaway.
• • New talks with Caroline Munroe and Tom Savini.
• • An in-person Q&A at the New Beverly theater with Lustig, producer Andrew Garroni, and porn legend Sharon Mitchell (who plays a nurse in Maniac). Lustig publicly talks about directing Mitchell in the hardcore roughie The Violation of Claudia, and they both joke about how she was underage at the time!

In addition to Maniac, Andrew Garroni produced a number of “erotic thrillers” directed by Gregory Dark, including Animal Instincts 3: The Seductress. That’s the
one I wrote.

Briefly, Greg Dark conferred with me on utilizing Garroni’s rights to Maniac so we could work on a sequel. It was right around the time Dark and I pitched a Café Flesh 2 plot that was inspired by the Jerry Lewis-Oliver Platt father-and-son drama-about-comedy, Funny Bones. That one didn’t fly. But then I just figured we could adjust the sex scenes to murders and—voila—Son of the Maniac.

Alas, that didn’t fly either.

But we still have Maniac and this Blu-ray is the best version of it ever.

Until the next one.

*************************

Maniacal post-script: The ever-heroic Grindhouse Releasing is presently rolling Maniac out city-to-city as a midnight movie. It hits the Music Box Theatre on January 28th and 29th screenings, with director Bill Lustig in person. And me, too.