If you’re looking for a fairy tale that trades in moral lessons for, well, other kinds of lessons, The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio is exactly the kind of sleazy, weird and profoundly goofy artifact you seek. Directed by Corey Allen — who, in a bizarre twist of fate, went on to direct episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Murder, She Wrote as well as the Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow movie Avalanche and who appeared in Rebel Without a Cause — this is a softcore sex comedy that makes you wonder what exactly was in the water in 1971. Maybe we should ask writer Chris Warfield, who also played an adult as Billy Thornberg.

Our story begins with Gepetta (Monica Gayle, my beloved Patch from Switchblade Sisters, as well as the titular Nashville Girl), a lonely hippie woodcarver who just wants a companion. Thanks to a visit from a fairy godmother played by the legendary sexploitation icon Dyanne Thorne (who would go on to be the Ilsa of Nazi exploitation fame), her life-sized wooden puppet (Alex Roman, who died after scuba diving into a kelp bed) becomes a real man.

The twist? It’s not his nose that grows when he tells a lie. It’s his other equipment that grows whenever he engages in loveless sex. Naturally, the film turns into a surreal picaresque journey where our wooden protagonist wanders into a life of male prostitution and live sex shows, serving as a biological facsimile of a man who is essentially a puppet for everyone else’s desires.

The cinematography was handled by none other than drive-in hero Ray Dennis Steckler (under his pseudonym, Sven Christian), and his wife, Carolyn Brandt, can even be spotted in the audience of one of the film’s performances. It’s a true family affair if your family happened to be the bedrock of the 70s grindhouse circuit.

This is very softcore, meaning there is very little actual nudity compared to what modern viewers might expect. Instead, you get a lot of strange faces, loud orgasm sounds that resemble a roller coaster malfunction and a narrative that manages to be both deeply cynical and aggressively stupid at the same time.

You also get appearances by Karen Smith (Candi from H.O.T.S.), Debbie Osborne (The Toy Box), Neola Graef (Cries of Ecstasy, Blows of Death), Sandy Dempsey (A Clock Work Blue), Uschi Digard (my dreams, really the whole movie is worth watching for her to show up; she was also in Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, Fantasm and Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks), Casey Larrain (Nympho Cycler), Barbara Mills (Sinthia: The Devil’s Doll), Ruthann Lott (Zero In and Scream) and Lynn Harris (The Erotic Adventures of Zorro).