Softcore Smorgasbord (August 4 – 10) All of the movies on this list have at one time or another been available through Something Weird Video. I’m sure I’ve missed some but many of them are still available on their website (until the end of 2024). These are their vintage softcore movies listed under categories with ridiculous names like: Nudie Cuties, Sexy Shockers, Sexo a-go-go, Twisted Sex, and Bucky Beaver’s Double Softies.

Before Herschell Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman made this movie, adult films were black and white smokers played in the back rooms of men’s clubs and social clubs. They were hired by film distributor Alfred N. Sack to make a “color 35mm film of cute girls carousing around with beach balls, or whatever.” Sack made most of his money working with his brother distributing black cinema at a time that it barely existed. He paid the two $7,000.

Comedian Billy Falbo plays Lucky Pierre, who mainly walks into situations where he sees women naked. Unlike many of the nudist films — in which people may have been nude but were engaged in volleyball or other games — this was the first of the nudie cuties, a film where pretty girls got naked in a comedy. In his book A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King, Friedman estimated that there were six hundred ripoffs over the next decade.

You can see a pre-gore film William Kerwin as a man hiring a plumber and Lewis regular Lawrence J. Aberwood’s voice as the announcer as well as pretty ladies including Kay Montie, Pat O’Farrell, Linda Cotton, Dorothy Holbrook, Toni Carroll (her last role; she also appeared on some television and was the first wife of producer David L. Wolper), Gail Jordan and Ginger Hale, who would appear in two other movies for the team,  Goldilocks and the Three Bares and Boin-n-g, as well as Peter Perry Jr.’s The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill.

Filmed in Cutie Color and Skinamascope, this feels like Benny Hill but somehow slow, as if naked women can be boring. In 1961, this was obviously volcanic in its intensity, but today it is a reminder of the wars of the sexual revolution. However, so much of adult moves on from here, so we should look at it as a monument.