Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video (August 25 – 31) Welcome to the wonderfully wacky world of Johnny Legend’s Untamed Video! Take a walk on the wild side with troublesome teenagers, sleazy sex kittens, way-out hippies, country bumpkins, big bad bikers, Mexican wrestlers, and every other variety of social deviant you can think of.

I’m a very simple man. I love a good hygiene movie. A square up reel? Pure excitement. If a movie starts with a scientist or a learned man of medicine explaining that this is a true story and that we need to be open to what we see, well, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Albert Rose (Leslie Marlowe) is the American ideal: handsome looks, comes from old money, can play sports and a smash with the ladies. Yet one day, he’s lured to a hotel and blackmailed by the proof that he deserted his platoon during a firefight over in Korea and he’s also slept with a prostitute. To get away with these crimes, he paid someone else to take the blame. Now, Dominita (Dorian Wayne) demands that he pay her twenty grand and be his slave for one year.

Also: He has to become a woman.

Ruth (Wendy Roberts), who trains him to be a maid and gives him four estrogen pills a day, insists that this is all a game. He becomes Rose Albert and Diminita claims that he wanted this punishment and was always a woman inside. When Ruth falls in love with him, it’s because she’s a lesbian and wants him to be a woman.

This sets up a really interesting situation, of a man who may or may not want to be a woman, yet has fallen for a woman who only loves him when he has subverted his sex. Yet it’s all forgotten when Albert realizes that Dominita and he have met before, as she’s really Dominique Festro, a soldier who also deserted in Korea that he shot in the leg.

We’re back at the end in the square up reel, as after this exploitation movie, the psychologist asks us to be tolerant of cross dressing and transvestites. That’s pretty open minded today, never mind in 1967.

Perhaps even more amazing is that this is the first movie by Bob Clark, years before he’d make the alpha and omega of holiday movies, Black Christmas and A Christmas Story.

Based on a story by Harris Anders, Clark wrote the script with Jeff Gillen, who would act in his movies Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, Deathdream and, one day years later, as Santa in A Christmas Story.

Leslie Marlowe was one of the first American drag queens to perform in clubs and Dorian Wayne was known as the Queen of the Florida Queens. His real name was Rick Colantino and he performed at clubs throughout Florida before becoming a dresser for Broadway shows.

This is probably — definitely — offensive to people on both side of the LGBTQ+ spectrum, but it’s fascinating to see Bob Clark as John Waters.

You can watch this on YouTube.