Clyde King (Wally Cox, the iconic voice of Underdog) is a mild-mannered, dorky toy store employee with two main pastimes: hand-carving wooden finger puppets and creeping around public spaces to stalk beautiful women. Enter Mother (Julie Newmar), the ruthlessly sultry CEO of a failing toy empire. Desperate to steal Clyde’s artisan puppet designs to save her bottom line, she dispatches her second-in-command and human sweat sponge, Lyle “Skippy” Burns (Victor Buono), to sign Clyde at any cost.
When Clyde refuses to join the corporate fold—mostly because Newmar triggers deeply psycho Oedipal dream sequences where Clyde imagines her as his stern mother humiliating him in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit—Lyle takes drastic measures. Learning that Clyde is driven by sheer horniness, Lyle tries to entice him into signing by baiting him with a relentless carousel of luscious starlets.
When every setup ends in catastrophic, slapstick failure, Lyle goes to extreme lengths: he dons full streetwalker drag to seduce Clyde himself, gets molested by confused johns, quotes Citizen Kane to his boss and ultimately decides that the only logical next step is to murder the little creep.
There is a fine line between a lost exploitation treasure and an unwatchable trainwreck, and Up Your Teddy Bear ecstatically dances right across it while wearing garish whore makeup and a Mini Cooper for a shoe.
Director Don Joslyn directs as if he threw the film strips in the air and spliced them together in whatever pattern they landed on the cutting room floor. The vignette-style structure gives the movie plenty of room to breathe, be bawdy and show gratuitous skin (most notably Angelique Pettyjohn). Connecting it all is a bizarrely charming, hep-cat musical score by Quincy Jones. Yes, that really happens.
This also has Thordis Brandt (The Witchmaker) and Claire Kelly (The Loved One), while cinematographer Robert Maxwell worked on tons of sleaze: Violated!. The Centerfold Girls, The Candy Snatchers, Blood Mania and more.
You can watch this on Cultpix.
