Tag Archives: Doris Wishman

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE BEST OF DORIS WISHMAN (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: Anonymous

FEATURING: Archival footage

PLOT: This odd little disc is a collection of segments and trailers from Doris Wishman movies, along with edited footage from other psychotronic films set to swinging vintage catalog music.

Still from The Best of Doris Wishman (2021)

COMMENTS: If you’re anything like me, you’ve been searching for a compilation of the sleazy strip-club jazz music featured in little-old-lady-cum-disreputable-pornographer Doris Wishman’s offbeat 1960s and 1970s exploitation movies for years. Having actually looked at that sentence typed out, it occurs to me that you are almost certainly nothing like me. But please read on anyway.

Something Weird’s “The Best of Doris Wishman” advertises itself as a soundtrack (your choice of CD or vintage vinyl) with an accompanying DVD “filled with Doris’ outrageous oeuvre!” Since this is a movie site, we won’t be delving deeply into the aesthetic qualities Wishman’s music. The original songs commissioned especially for her early nudist movies are pure kitsch (“I’m moonin’ over you, my little moon doll,” croons Ralph Young in the theme to Nude on the Moon.) The library music  selected to accompany Wishman’s roughies are often surprisingly competent, if not always germane to the onscreen action—as if the director were picking at random from a stack of nearby 45s. But again, we’re not here for the music.

The ad copy doesn’t really explain what part of “Doris’ outrageous oeuvre” is on the DVD. If you guessed “trailers,” you’re mostly correct. The video content is synced to the accompanying soundtrack, to the point where you are offered a countdown so you can drop your needle on your record at the appropriate start point (I believe only the LP syncs up, as with bonus tracks the CD has a slightly longer running time). Although the content is mostly trailers, for several segments—mostly the early naturalist films—the original tunes play over scenes of nudists frolicking in the nudie pool, using beach balls to carefully cover up their pubic hair. Sprinkled throughout the assembly you’ll find audio cues of Wishman caught on tape, usually to embarrassing effect (she forgets which partner was on top when blocking a love scene; her cameraman yells at her to get out of the shot). Nineteen of Wishman’s thirty-one movies are represented here in some form, including both Indecent Desires and Bad Girls Go to Hell (in trailer form only, although the soundtrack has an additional cut for each). For a fan, it’s a fine trip down memory lane, and it’s unlikely that any but the most dedicated Wishmanites will have seen all these movies.

But that’s not all! The real surprise, and an unexpected treat, is a collection of bonus content that’s almost as long as the feature. You see, the soundtrack music was remastered by an outre audophile company called Modern Harmonic, in collaboration with Something Weird (who own Wishman’s movie catalog). After the feature presentation ends, Modern Harmonic throws in an additional 25 minutes of musical highlights—ranging from early soul to jazz to rock n roll—scored to edits of various other Something Weird titles. These are taken from other LP/CD releases, either “Something Weird Greatest Hits” or individual soundtrack releases. Some of them are just clips or trailers, but others are edited experimentally: action sequences from Doll Squad are rejiggered to make the actors dance to a funky bongo-riffic groove; a cute-but-spiteful 50s brunette from Fuzz Box gets trapped in a loop enviously checking out a blonde rival, serenaded by a psychedelic band who wouldn’t rock out in their garage for another decade and a half. And a crapsetrpiece like Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) doesn’t require fancy tricks to hold its own: just show an abridged version of the film, with Dracula and his press-on goatee spying on and abducting swinging sixties maidens with the help of his werewolf companion while a sax and organ combo vamps for five minutes.

The Wishmania was welcome, but Modern Harmonic’s bonus material makes this an unexpected, if minor and very particular, pleasure. Try serving this campy retro buffet at your pad for your next psychedelic sex party, and you might be surprised at how well you get on. If nothing else, you’ll be one step closer to being like me.

Canonically Weird (The List)

277. INDECENT DESIRES (1968)

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“[Wishman] seemed genuinely surprised, even skeptical, that anyone could find her work worthy of study, probably because at first glance her films often reveal such trademark low-budget production values as dodgy lighting and interiors resembling rundown motel rooms. Yet behind her economically deprived visuals lie a wealth of imagination: wildly improbable plots, bizarre ‘method’ acting and scripts yielding freely to fantasy.”–“Incredibly Strange Films”

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sharon Kent, Michael Alaimo, Trom Little, Jackie Richards

PLOT: A nebbishy pack rat finds a ring and a blonde doll in a trash can; soon after, he sees secretary Ann walking to work, then sees the image of the doll overlaid on Ann’s body. Returning to his dingy apartment, he puts on the ring and gropes the doll, and Ann feels invisible hands on her as she stands by the water cooler. The stalker follows Ann home after she leaves work, discovers she has a steady boyfriend, and takes out his jealousy on the doll.

Still from Indecent Desires (1968)

BACKGROUND:

  • Doris Wishman, who had worked in film distribution, began her directing career after her husband died at a young age as a way to keep busy. She originally began working in the brief nudist camp genre, movies that rushed to exploit nudity after a New York judge ruled that stories set within the nudist lifestyle were not per se obscene. After the fad for nudist films, and the “nudie cutie” sub-genre that grew out of them, died out, Wishman moved into the production of “roughies,” a sexploitation genre with less actual nudity but more violence and kink. She was one of the only women directing such films at the time. Indecent Desires comes from the middle of this period, which lasted roughly from 1965’s Bad Girls Go to Hell to 1970’s The Amazing Transplant.
  • Wishman’s 1960s movies were mostly shot without sound. Dialogue was dubbed in later. She often directed longtime cameraman C. Davis Smith to focus the camera on ashtrays,  potted plants, or an actress’ feet instead of the person speaking in order to make the sound syncing easier later. This technique initially confused audiences, but later became recognized as a Wishman trademark.
  • Like most of her work of this period, Wishman used “Louis Silverman” as her directing pseudonym and “Dawn Whitman” as her writing pseudonym.
  • Terri McSorley‘s Staff Pick for a Certified Weird movie.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The image of the blonde trash can doll superimposed over Ann as she walks to work. This sight is the closest thing to a special effect to ever appear in one of Wishman’s movies.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: Doll-groping transient; Babs makes out with herself; nude leg lifts

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Doris Wishman made sleazy sexploitation movies marked by their strange camerawork, unsynced sound, grimy settings, amateur acting by curvy models in lingerie, odd plots, burlesque house jazz soundtracks, and a weird, pervasive sense of erotic guilt. Indecent Desires features her usual shenanigans delivered in one of her most inexplicable stories: a tale of a symbiotic relationship between a stalker, a doll, and a beautiful woman that is so context-free it serves as a fill-in-the-blank sexual parable. It’s perhaps her strangest and most disconnected plot, which makes it the perfect item to represent Wishman on the List of the Weirdest Movies of all Time.


Original trailer for Indecent Desires (audio only)

COMMENTS: Whatever her filmmaking talents, or lack of same, Continue reading 277. INDECENT DESIRES (1968) →

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

NUDE ON THE MOON (1962)

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It’s 1962. You are a producer/director who, admittedly, makes films for the primary purpose of turning a profit. Now, you only have a budget of about fifty bucks. So, what’s the best way to turn a profit? Skin, of course. There is, however, a bit of an obstacle. The obscenity laws prohibit nudity. Of course, that is hardly an obstacle if your name is . Doris was well aware of THE BIG LOOPHOLE. Nudity on film was permissible IF it was confined to a nudist colony, because we all know there is, indeed, educational value in filming naturists. And if you really want to double your potential profit, you take that nudist colony and put it on the moon for the sic-fi kids. Amazing, but true!

Our space adventure begins with a 7th grader’s lame drawing of outer space accompanied by an endlessly lame theme song sung by an equally lame crooner. Jeff (Lester Brown) wants to go to the moon. But, poor Jeff does not have the funding. Even worse, Jeff can’t seem to get aroused by his horny , buxom secretary, Cathy. The Professor (William Mayer) is also in a predicament. In addition to having about five gallons of shellac in his hair, he is stuck listening to Jeff’s money problems and to Cathy’s confessions about her pent-up desires. Time to smoke a pipe.

Lo and behold, Jeff’s uncle dies and leaves Jeff three million bucks. To heck with the government, we are going to the moon ourselves! Come on professor. Let’s go! Space makes the boys a tad sleepy, and somehow they wake up after having landed somewhere. Maybe it’s the moon. Maybe it’s not.

Nude on the Moon posterOur dynamic duo jump into their red and green power ranger suits and discover, you guessed it, a nudist colony. But, this is not just any nudist colony. Actually, it’s just a topless colony. Oh, and the topless Martians all have antenna through which they communicate. This, of course, makes dubbing a heck of a lot easier. Jeff and the professor, being hu-mans, do have to chat, so there are plenty of shots from behind so we won’t see their lip movements are out of sync with the sound.

This must be the dark side of the moon, with plenty of lush vegetation and a volley ball court. The Queen (Marietta) looks an awful lot like Cathy (Marietta), except Queenie’s allergic to blouses. There are a few moon men too, pulled from the list of rejects from Tarzan casting calls.

A few light taps on the head from a moon chick’s abracadabra viagra stick and suddenly Jeff’s noticing boobs. Now Jeff’s happy! For the first time in his life, Jeff is as giddy as a school boy. But, gosh darn it, Jeff’s gonna run outta oxygen. Goodbye boobs. Back in the space ship, back home, and, hey Cathy looks just like the Queen! I’ll bet Cathy has boobs too, thinks Jeff. After an excessively long panning back and forth between Cathy clothed and Jeff’s eyes trying hard to bug out, Cathy loses her blouse and, yes, she has boobs just like the Queen! Jeff is happy again, despite having received a call from the government. They don’t believe Jeff and the professor went to the moon! Who cares? Jeff now knows that, to find boobs, he need not look any further than his own back yard.

There’s no place like home.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

LET ME DIE A WOMAN (1978)

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In a round table meeting with a couple of editors, I was discussing a proposed documentary (which we abandoned). As we were dialoguing, I mentioned a scene which would require green screen. One of the editors stopped me short and said: “This is a documentary. You do not do green screen shots in a documentary.” When I explained that the scene was meant to be poetic and dream-like, which did pertain to the subject at hand, my editor persisted: “You still cannot do that. That’s against all the rules of documentary filmmaking.” I ended that with: “So who made these rules?” If I had thought that argument through, I probably would have tied the editor down and shown him two documentary films, which break “THE rules.” One would be Guy Maddin‘s My Winnipeg (2007) and the other would be ‘s Let Me Die A Woman (1978).

Doris Wishman’s documentary about sex change is cinema’s closest cousin to Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda (1953). Like Wood, Wishman cannot refrain from coating the subject at hand with her own idiosyncratic sheen. So much the better, because like the Wood film, personality is the most salvageable quality of Let Me Die A Woman. Ed Wood was supposed to make a film about a sex change but he turned his opus into a delightfully desperate, personal plea for acceptance of transvestism. Narratively (ahem) Wishman’s film does not divert quite so far from the topic. Visually, now that’s a different story altogether.

Shots of monstrously thick, red shag carpet (which would look so at home on the set of Trinity Broadcast Network), a “what the hell is that doing there?” Siamese cat and the standard Wishman shots of feet scurrying across a dark red floor are among the countless surreal cut-aways. If Wishman’s wandering camera frequently provokes dumbfound amazement, here the cut-aways interrupt poor Leslie with callous abandon. Leslie methodically applies her lipstick, straps on her garter, looks directly at the camera and tells us: “Last year, I was a man!” Cue in cheesy music. Leslie is the attractive, post-op transsexual star who introduces the viewer into the world of “gender dysphoria.” She is candid, expressive, and the only genuine human in the entire film. Unfortunately, whenever Leslie begins to hook us into her personal story, Wishman swings her goddamned camera into WTF land!

Still from Let Me Die a Woman (1977)No one familiar with Wishman’s body of work would be naive enough to expect a sympathetic treatment of the subject. Pornographic actors Harry Reems and Vanessa Del Rio provide cameos, just to make sure we know it’s a freak show. Like we need the proof. Gratuitous sex scenes, the lamest drag queens ever captured on celluloid, and Dr. Leo Wollman each have their own tent on the carnival grounds. Wollman  serves as the downright creepy ringmaster, acting as if he belongs in one of those wretched Faces of Death videos. He lectures us from a hideously decorated office. It is blatantly obvious Wollman is reading off cue cards when he gives us details aplenty about the SEX CHANGE OPERATION! Whether we want the details or not is a moot point. Actual surgical footage, brought to you in all the ghastly glory of 1978 color, accompanies Wollman’s monotone narration. Where are the horror horn and fear flasher when you need them?

Flopping penises, dildos galore, and Dr. Wollman’s fingers probing a vagina are the visual highlights (!) brought to you by Madame Wishman. Do you really have to ask why  is in love with this mondo trash mutant of a film?

Regardless, Wishman does it her way, God bless her!  Next week, we will wrap up our series on the films of Doris Wishman with Nude On the Moon (1961). 

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

THE AMAZING TRANSPLANT (1970)

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Of course, , the self-taught, innovative grand dame of sexploitation and grindhouse films, personally stamped everything she did. Wishman’s repeated focus on inanimate objects is her most infamous trademark. Hideous wallpaper, repeated shots of feet, and dirty floor tiles were favorite concentrations in some of the most outrageous compositions ever filtered through a lens. All of those abound in The Amazing Transplant (1970), but there is an additional focal point here: a giant moose head hanging on the wall. I have no idea what the hell it means, if anything. It is tempting to say that, perhaps, it’s a symbolic joke at the expense of male testosterone, except that this may also be Wishman’s most misogynistic film—which is saying quite a lot.

The Hands of Orlac (1924), Mad Love (1935), The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) and The Hand (1981), all dealt with with hand transplants resulting in murderous hands. Most of these films at least had an iota of style, and two of them starred the iconic character actor Peter Lorre. In this film, Doris Wishman gives us her take on a transplanted member. Naturally, no Wishman film would dare to tackle something so acceptable as a hand. No, Wishman’s raving lunatic has a newly-grafted penis. Lest one be tempted to conjure up the image of David Cronenberg’s vampire phallus growing from the armpit of the late porn star Marilyn Chambers (Rabid-1977), I lament to report that The Amazing Transplant is nowhere near as anatomically outrageous. That is simply because we never see the Edward Hyde anaconda of poor Arthur (Juan Fernandez)—which is probably a good thing. Perhaps the hanging moose head is a sufficient avatar for all things phallic after all.

Still from The Amazing Transplant (1970)Wishman usually dubbed her films, which led her to focus the camera on anything but the actor speaking. Here, Wishman did her audience a commendable service, despite the fact that the dubbing is atrocious. The acting here is possibly the worst found in any Doris Wishman film, and not seeing her amateur thespians mouth their dialogue may actually make the film more bearable.

Arthur was never too adept with women, at least not until his late bosom bud Felix, a Casanova Continue reading THE AMAZING TRANSPLANT (1970) →